News in General

In Iceland, hundreds of people have fled rising floodwaters since the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl) glacier erupted Wednesday for the second time in less than a month. As water gushed down the mountainside, rivers rose up to 10 feet (3 meters) by Wednesday night.

The volcano's smoke and ash poses a threat to aircraft because it can affect visibility, and microscopic debris can get sucked into airplane engines and can cause them to shut down.

BERLIN – The German government may consider taking legal action in a case in which Goldman Sachs & Co. is accused of defrauding investors, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The U.S. government alleges Goldman Sachs sold mortgage investments without telling buyers they were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them failing.

Buyers included German bank IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG — an early victim of the financial crisis that was rescued by the state-owned KfW development bank among others.

The Welt am Sonntag newspaper quoted Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, UIrich Wilhelm, as saying that German regulator BaFin will ask the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for information.

"After a careful evaluation of the documents, we will examine legal steps," he said, according to the report.

There was no immediate confirmation from the government.

IKB spokeswoman Annette Littmann said the bank is aware of the charges filed by the SEC, but declined to comment further.

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 9pm

The aliens

Technological Slavery
The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber”
Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber” Introduction by David Skrbina
6 x 9 • 480 pages • ISBN: 978-1-932595-80-2

Publish Date: July 15, 2010

Theodore Kaczynski saw violent collapse as the only way to bring down the techno-industrial system, and in more than a decade of mail bomb terror he killed three people and injured 23
others.

One does not need to support the actions that landed Kaczynski in supermax prison to see the value of his essays disabusing the notion of heroic technology while revealing the manner in which it is destroying the planet.

For the first time, readers will have an uncensored personal account of his anti-technology philosophy, including a corrected version of the notorious “Unabomber Manifesto,” Kaczynski’s critique of anarcho-primitivism, and essays regarding “The Coming Revolution.”

Dr. David Skrbina, who teaches philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, provides fascinating excerpts from his correspondence with the man he calls “a revolutionary for our times.” Theodore J. Kaczynski does not receive remuneration for this book, and a portion of all revenue will be donated to the American Red Cross.

“Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying that does not dismiss his argument. … As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasons in [Kaczynski’s writing].” — Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems in “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired magazine.

1995: “[As] machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” -”Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski

Death Wish dad found dead

croatiantimes.com

A Death Wish dad who gunned down a judge and his accomplice after they raped his four year old daughter has been found dead, say police.

Police in Lithuania said the body of Drasius Kedys was discovered 30km from his home town of Kaunas and has been identified by members of his family.

They did not, however, give a cause of death and an autopsy will be held on Saturday.

Kedys, 37, had been missing since he shot judge Jonas Furmanaviczius, 47, and a female accomplice seven months ago after police ignored his pleas for help when his daughter Deimantela was abused by a paedophile ring.

Police believed he'd spent several months in Britain posing as a migrant worker and earlier this month released new artists impressions of what he could look like now.

Kedys became a cult hero across Europe with websites formed to support him and souvenir T-shirts and mugs dubbing him: "Drasius - Lone Avenger."

T-shirts and mugs dubbing him: "Drasius - Lone Avenger."

artists impressions of what he could look like now.