February 2008 Monthly Archive

February 28, 2008

Obama Says He's Quit Smoking

Barack Obama said he has successfully quit smoking cigarettes despite the pressures of a closely contested and lengthy presidential campaign.

"I've been chewing on this Nicorette, which tastes like you're chewing on ground pepper - but it does help," the Democratic candidate said in an interview that aired Thursday on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

His wife, Michelle, had used his smoking as leverage when the two were discussing whether he should run for president. She would agree only if Obama agreed to give up smoking.

"I had been sneaking three cigarettes, four cigarettes a day for a while, and she said if you're going to do this you've got to stop - precisely because the stress was going to increase, and it'll just get worse," Obama said. "So that's an example of my wife making me a better man once again."

The Illinois senator told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres that dancing on her show had helped him win voters.

"I just want to say that we were kind of in a slump until I was dancing on the show," he joked, referring to his appearance on her show last fall. "My poll numbers skyrocketed after that. Everybody saw me bust a move on Ellen - that's all it took."

On Monday, DeGeneres showed up by satellite at a fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton on the campus of George Washington University in the District of Columbia.

DeGeneres told Obama that she and many other voters find the two Democratic candidates appealing.

"I really like you. I really like Hillary. And I think a lot of people feel the same way," she said. "Why vote for you?"

Obama said he can unite the country.

"I think I have a better chance at getting Democrats and independents and Republicans to come together and put aside some partisan bickering that has been going on for a long time now that the Clintons were involved in," he said.

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Associated Press | Thursday, February 28, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News

 

A Little Nuke Music

The New York Philharmonic’s concert in Pyongyang was a tantalizing taste of what might be in America’s relationship with North Korea. It was also a reminder of the missteps and dangerously wrongheaded judgments that have kept the two countries apart and at saber-point for more than a half century.

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New York Times | Thursday, February 28, 2008 | Topic: Editorials

 

Obama Fights False Links to Islam

For Barack Obama, it is an ember that he has doused time and again, only to see it flicker anew: links to Islam fanned by false rumors, innuendo and association. Obama and his campaign reacted strongly this week when a photo of him in Kenyan tribal garb began spreading on the Internet.

And the praise he received Sunday from Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan prompted pointed questions - during Tuesday night's presidential debate and also in a private meeting over the weekend with Jewish leaders in Cleveland.

During the debate, Obama repeated his denunciation of Farrakhan's views, which have included numerous anti-Semitic comments. And, after being pressed, he rejected Farrakhan's support in the presidential race.

The Democratic candidate says repeatedly that he's a Christian who took the oath of office on a family Bible. Yet on the Internet and on talk radio - and in a campaign introduction for John McCain this week - he is often depicted, falsely, as a Muslim with shadowy ties and his middle name, Hussein, is emphasized as a reminder of Iraq's former leader.

"If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim," he told the Jewish leaders in Cleveland, according to a transcript of the private session.

The photo of Obama wearing Kenyan tribal raiments - taken by an Associated Press photographer during his visit in 2006 to the country where his father was born - resurfaced on the Internet amid unsubstantiated claims that it was being circulated by members of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. Clinton and her aides said they had nothing to do with it. The Obama campaign accused them of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering."

On Tuesday Republican candidate McCain denounced the introduction he got in Cincinnati that criticized Obama in vivid terms. Talk show host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama three times as "Barack Hussein Obama" and called him a "hack, Chicago-style" politician during the introduction of McCain.

The Obama campaign is closely attuned to the rumors and insinuations. Information on Obama's Christian faith is prominently available on the "Know the facts" page of his Web site. The campaign has distributed flyers to churches in states with presidential contests. And it encourages supporters to flag any attack that may make its way into cyberspace.

"Our campaign is vigilant in quickly responding to any information about Senator Obama that surfaces, be it on the Internet, in the media or from our opponents," spokesman Bill Burton said Wednesday.

If there is confusion - and opportunity for political mischief - it derives at least in part from Obama's rich cultural background. His mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father was Kenyan and he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country.

"My grandfather, who was Kenyan, converted to Christianity, then converted to Islam," Obama said Sunday. "My father never practiced; he was basically agnostic. So, other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child, I have very little connection to the Islamic religion."

Obama has become careful in denouncing the links, lately noting that some rumors about him also have been insulting to Muslims. Jim Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said many Arab Americans are drawn to Obama because of his cultural background.

"It is clear he wants to have a broader relationship with the Muslim world," Zogby said. "He has a biography that connects him to the Muslim world."

Obama, though in the presidential limelight now for more than a year, is still introducing himself to voters. An AP-Yahoo poll in January asked people to volunteer the first few words that came to mind about each of the candidates, and 4 percent of the respondents, unprompted, mentioned the word Muslim when describing Obama.

Some of the rumors and allegations about Obama are clearly not true, yet still spread, often anonymously:

- A debunked chain e-mail circulating widely on the Internet suggests he is hiding his Islamic roots. It says he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran and turns his back on the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance.

He took his Senate oath with his hand on a family Bible, and he says, "Whenever I'm in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America." In fact, no candidate could survive if he publicly spurned the pledge.

- Another false report says he attended a Muslim madrassa school as a child in Jakarta. Obama was born in Hawaii and moved to Indonesia when he was 6 to live with his mother and stepfather. He returned to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his maternal grandparents. Interviews last year by The Associated Press at the elementary school in Jakarta found that it is a public and secular institution and has been open to students of all faiths since before Obama attended in the late 1960s. Said vice principal Akmad Solichin: "Yes, most of our students are Muslim, but there are Christians as well. Everyone's welcome here."

- Obama also has faced questions about his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he has been a member for 20 years. Trinity calls itself "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." But it accepts non-black congregants. The United Church of Christ's president and general minister, the Rev. John H. Thomas, was quoted in a church publication as pointing out that the Rev. Jane Fisler-Hoffman, Illinois Conference Minister, who is white, "has been a member of the congregation for years."

- Obama has been asked about Farrakhan's words of praise and Farrakhan's receipt of an award from "Trumpet Newsmagazine," a Trinity church publication last month. Obama told Jewish leaders Sunday: "An award was given to Farrakhan for his work on behalf of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statements. And I believe that was a mistake and showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community and I said so."

Farrakhan did not endorse Obama but said Sunday: "This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better." Asked Tuesday night whether he would accept support from Farrakhan, Obama said: "I live in Chicago. He lives in Chicago. I've been very clear, in terms of me believing that what he has said is reprehensible and inappropriate. And I have consistently distanced myself from him."

Following an exchange with Clinton, he then added: "There's no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word 'reject' Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce."

(This version CORRECTS to show that elementary school in Jakarta was not Catholic.))

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Jim Kuhnhenn - Associated Press | Thursday, February 28, 2008 | Topic: Breaking Story

 

February 27, 2008

Scientists Predict When World Will End

Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.

The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth farther out into space, but not far enough.

Our home planet will be snagged by the sun's outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.

"The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun," explains astronomer Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in southern England.

Previous projections had all figured that the Earth would avoid falling into the sun, even during our star's red-giant phase.

The good news: This won't happen for another 7.6 billion years.

The bad news: Life on Earth will end long before then.

That may sound like a long time, but in fact life on Earth's been around a lot longer than that — a total of 3.7 billion years, according to the latest estimates.

For those first three billion years, true, we were nothing but pond scum. Still, the new figures indicate the long story of life on our fair blue-green planet may be entering its last act.

Is there any way our future descendants can save themselves? Why, yes, explains Smith.

He cites a recent study emanating from the University of California, Santa Cruz. It proposes taming an asteroid to swing by the Earth every few thousand years, slowly nudging the Earth into higher solar orbit, enough to outpace the sun's own outward growth.

"This sounds like science fiction," says Smith. "But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries."

In fact, we've only got a billion years left before the slowly expanding sun boils off the oceans and reduces our planet to an uninhabitable cinder, says Smith.

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Fox News | Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Topic: Science and Technology

 

IRS Investigates Obama's Denomination

The IRS is investigating the United Church of Christ over a speech Sen. Barack Obama gave at its national meeting last year after he became a candidate for president, the denomination said Tuesday.

Obama, an Illinois Democrat, belongs to the 1.2 million-member Protestant group through his Chicago congregation.

In a letter the denomination received Monday, the IRS said "reasonable belief exists" that the circumstances surrounding the speech violated restrictions on political activity for tax-exempt organizations. The denomination has denied any wrongdoing.

Obama, a member of Trinity United Church of Christ, spoke about faith and public life at the denomination's June 2007 General Synod in Hartford, Conn.

The IRS said in the letter that it was concerned about articles posted on the church's Web site and on other sites stating that Obama had addressed nearly 10,000 people at the event. The agency also said Obama volunteers had staffed campaign tables "outside the center to promote his campaign."

The Rev. J. Bennett Guess, a spokesman for the Cleveland-based denomination, said a group of Obama volunteers was outside the Hartford Civic Center, where the event took place, but that they were told they could not enter the meeting.

The UCC had invited Obama to speak a year before he announced he was running for president because of his involvement in the denomination, Guess said.

Church leaders consulted with lawyers before the event on following IRS rules. Before Obama spoke, a top church official told the crowd that the senator's talk was not a campaign-related event and that no leaflets or other signs of political support would be allowed.

Nonprofits are barred from endorsing candidates or providing support for campaigns, although groups are allowed to invite candidates to address them and many do so. Guess said no other presidential candidates were invited because Obama was the only one active in the UCC.

The Rev. John H. Thomas, president of the denomination, called the inquiry "disturbing."

"When the invitation to an elected public official to speak to the national meeting of his own church family is called into question, it has a chilling effect on every religious community," Thomas said in a statement.

Amy Brundage, an Obama spokeswoman, insisted the speech was not a campaign event. In the address, Obama spoke about his personal spiritual journey and had said that faith had been misused in the past to divide Americans, partly because of the Christian right.

The IRS has stepped up its monitoring of the political activity of nonprofit groups during the 2008 election. It is more common for individual congregations to be targeted, not entire denominations, but very large ministries have been investigated in the past.

The inquiries can take years. Punishments can range from a financial penalty to loss of tax-exempt status - an outcome that church attorneys call the "death penalty" for nonprofits.

The IRS does not comment on investigations because tax information is confidential.

J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which defends religious groups against government interference, called the timing of the investigation "peculiar." But he said he generally has found the IRS to be nonpartisan.

"They have not gone after the left or the right or one party over another," Walker said. "Both sides have accused the service of doing that, but my impression is that they've done a pretty good job being nonpartisan."

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Rachel Zoll - AP | Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Topic: Breaking Story

 

Experts warn that automated killer robots 'threat to humanity'

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

"They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world -- from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones -- can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders "are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war," he said.

Several countries, led by the United States, have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense's Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.

But even more worrisome, he continued, is the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

"I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me," Sharkey said.

Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked closely with the US military on robotics, agrees that the shift towards autonomy will be gradual.

But he is not convinced that robots don't have a place on the front line.

"Robotics systems may have the potential to out-perform humans from a perspective of the laws of war and the rules of engagement," he told a conference on technology in warfare at Stanford University last month.

The sensors of intelligent machines, he argued, may ultimately be better equipped to understand an environment and to process information. "And there are no emotions that can cloud judgement, such as anger," he added.

Nor is there any inherent right to self-defence.

For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.

Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine -- even an intelligent one -- how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.

But even if technical barriers are overcome, the prospect of armies increasingly dependent on remotely-controlled or autonomous robots raises a host of ethical issues that have barely been addressed.

Arkin points out that the US Department of Defense's 230 billion dollar Future Combat Systems programme -- the largest military contract in US history -- provides for three classes of aerial and three land-based robotics systems.

"But nowhere is there any consideration of the ethical implications of the weaponisation of these systems," he said.

For Sharkey, the best solution may be an outright ban on autonomous weapons systems. "We have to say where we want to draw the line and what we want to do -- and then get an international agreement," he said.

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AFP | Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News

 

February 26, 2008

McCain distances himself from supporter's comments

A supporter of John McCain, speaking at an official campaign event in Ohio attended by the Arizona senator, called Barack Obama a “hack, Chicago-style Daly politician,” and told the crowd “all is going to be right with the world when the great prophet from Chicago takes the stand, and the world leaders who want to kill us will simply be singing Kumbaya around the table of Barack Obama.”

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CNN | Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News

 

Texas: McCain 52% Huckabee 31%

John McCain has opened a substantial lead over Mike Huckabee in the Texas Republican Presidential Primary. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that McCain attracts 52% of the vote while Huckabee earns 31%. Ron Paul is a distant third with 8% while 10% are not sure. That twenty-one point lead is a huge improvement for McCain whose advantage was just nine percentage points last week. The Democratic Primary is heading in the opposite direction. Hillary Clinton began with a large lead and it has been slipping away.

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Rasmussen Reports | Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News

 

Romney son considers congressional bid

There won't be a Mitt on the ballot this fall, but there may be a Romney. Romney's son Josh, a frequent presence on the presidential campaign trail before his dad dropped out of the race, says he is considering running for Congress this year against Jim Matheson, a Democrat representing Utah's Second House district. "I haven't ruled it out," Romney, 32, was quoted as saying in yesterday's Deseret Morning News, a Salt Lake City daily. "I'm pretty young, but I've had good experience on the campaign trail."

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Boston Globe | Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News

 

2 polls say Obama is surging ahead of Clinton in Democratic race

Two new national polls yesterday indicated Barack Obama is surging ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. In a New York Times-CBS News poll, 54 percent of Democratic primary voters said they would prefer the party to nominate Barack Obama while 38 percent preferred Hillary Clinton. That was a sharp shift in Obama's favor from a poll in late January, when voters were split evenly, 41 percent each for Obama and Clinton.

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Boston Globe | Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Topic: Today's Top News