A member of an opposition group led by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov was released Monday from a psychiatric clinic after being held against her will for 46 days, a spokeswoman for the group said.

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What makes a young person happy? Spending time with family was the top answer among 1,280 people ages 13 through 24 surveyed on the nature of happiness by The Associated Press and MTV. The open-ended question drew that response from one in five respondents. Spending time with friends scored next on the happiness meter, followed by time with a significant other.

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Latina.com — A Cancun radio journalist reported Tuesday that he’d seen the Nobel Peace Prize winner forcibly removed from the five-star Fiesta Americana Coral Beach hotel when staff thought she was a local peddler woman, due to the traditional Maya clothing she wears.

But then, Menchu and her sister Anita said none of it had happened. “This was purely an invention of the press,” Anita told Latina.com today in an exclusive interview. “Nothing at all happened in the hotel, and we didn’t even know about the rumor until we got on the plane to go back to Mexico City.”

For his part, the reporter to whom the story was originally attributed, David Romero Vara of Cancun’s Enfoque Radio, admitted on air today that nothing happened to Menchu, and that the only ones who were removed forcibly from the hotel were his station’s reporters.

Hotel staff said they were allowing photographers and reporters only to enter a certain area. It is unclear whether Enfoque’s staff attempted to enter into a restricted area.

The Fark headline: “State provides a self-medicating morphine pump for inmate in a wheelchair with MS who was sentenced to 25 years for illegally possessing 100 Percocets that he was using to self-medicate his chronic pain.”

Fortunately, it seems that his clemency petition is now on the fast-track. The full story.

Companion to a program that looks at the life and career of Karl Rove, chief political adviser to President George W. Bush; the full program can be viewed at this site. Features biographical information, a chronology, essays about the Republican Party and politics in the state of Texas, interviews with political figures, news articles, and lesson plans. A joint report of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Frontline and the Washington Post.

Go to original by Roland Piquepaille

Go to original by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher He took some of the most famous news photos of our time but, as White House photographer from Truman to Johnson, his name was usually not attached to them and he was never widely known. But when Joe O’Donnell passed away six days ago in Nashville at the age of 85, he earned obit mention. He never worked for a newspaper, but thousands of them carried his iconic photos (to name just two) of FDR, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, and John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket.

O’Donnell was one of the first military photographers into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings and, still haunted, he had dug out some of his old images out of storage and was using them to make an antinuclear statement. I interviewed him for the book I was writing with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America.” O’Donnell told me flatly that he had long suffered from horrific medical effects that some doctors tied to radiation exposure in 1945. He described tumors, two 18” rods in his back, 12 feet of colon removed.

This is a special edition of these nominations. They all have to do with religion. Not included here, however, is the massacre of 175 civilians in the Yazidi community in Iraq. The victims were mostly Kurds, though neither Muslim nor Christian, and are considered by some to be a demonic cult whose members don’t believe in God. But to label the four suicide bombers as “assholes” would somehow trivialize the unspeakable horror and misery that they have caused. Here, then, are the real Assholes of the Week. Amen.

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By using a technique known as life cycle assessment, a pair of Greek researchers look at the total environmental impact of alternative energy technologies as compared to the impact of an equivalent energy output through burning fossil fuels.

Wind and geothermal energy are indeed green alternatives. The efficiency of these systems — over their entire life cycle — is comparable to that of fossil fuels.
Solar power did not fare as well. The electricity produced by photovoltaic cells is less efficient when production, running, and recycling is taken into account.

However, solar energy has the benefit of economy of scale; if you produce enough solar cells and have them covering a large enough area, the total life cycle efficiency for the generated electricity tips in the favor of solar cells when compared to traditional fossil fuels. Also, the authors noted that the pollution of solar systems is far, far less then traditional fossil fuels, even though they represent a lower thermodynamic efficiency.

The authors state, “A significant advantage of the use of renewable energy systems is that they are environmentally friendly because overall they result in lower dangerous pollutant emissions, this and one other major factor, they are essentially inexhaustible.”

Source: Int. J. of Global Energy Issues, 2007. DOI: 10.1504/IJGEI.2007.014865

Go to original by Matt Ford, ArsTechnica

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

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Bad air can trigger in young, healthy adults a string of adverse biological changes that are linked to cardiovascular disease, a Taiwan study has shown.
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The Immigration and Refugee Board denied him asylum saying they didn’t believe he was gay.

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