Archive Page 3
The state of Texas should not have removed children from a polygamist sect’s ranch because it didn’t prove that they were in “imminent danger,” an appeals court ruled Thursday.In the ruling, a three-judge panel did not order that the children be returned to their families on the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas.
Instead, the judges gave the lower court 10 days to vacate an order placing the children in state custody.
“The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department’s witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger,” the judges said.
Once hunted to the brink of extinction, humpback whales have made a dramatic comeback in the North Pacific Ocean over the past four decades, a new study says.The study released Thursday by SPLASH, an international organization of more than 400 whale watchers, estimates there were between 18,000 and 20,000 of the majestic mammals in the North Pacific in 2004-2006.
New site on creative reuses
How can you reuse fiber glass? Birth control pill boxes? Find out at ReadyMade’s new site:
(UpdateThis is not a ReadyMade site, I just misread the WorldChanging article that I found the site through)
Week in Review
Junk Computers Could Fuel Cars
Tribes buying back land at a rapid pace
Djibouti to work with UN to eliminate female genital mutilation
Nanohealing substance stops bleeding in seconds
USPS starts its own free small electronics recycling program
Computers, cell phones come to Cuba
Junk Computers Could Fuel Cars
Researchers in Romania have created a way to transform bits and pieces of printed circuit boards from jettisoned computers into clean raw materials for consumer products, such as fuel and plastics.[…]
The researchers collected printed circuit boards from discarded computers. They employed a special combination of catalysts, high temperatures and chemical filtration to destroy flame-retardant additives in the plastics. This removed nearly all the toxic substances from the scraps, resulting in oils that could be safely used as fuel or raw materials called feedstocks for a wide range of consumer products, the researchers said.
they wonder if the tribe is engaged in a shrewd chess game to block Shakopee’s development plans, then move out into open countryside to start reacquiring vast stretches of ancestral land. It’s a question emerging from New York to California as tribes riding high on casino profits have begun spending that wealth to reassert control over that ancestral land.In Shakopee itself, said Mayor John Schmitt, “It appears they’re out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it. And they have the war chest to do that.”
For his part, however, Stan Ellison, the tribe’s land manager, points to a pile of historic maps as a reminder of who, historically, interfered with whom.
“This land,” he said, “was taken by the point of a gun — and we are buying it back with American dollars.”
(via a day in the life)
Djibouti has become the first country to launch a joint programme by United Nations agencies to move more quickly to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM).The joint programme, run by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), is to begin in a country where nine out of every ten females has undergone the harmful practice.
Djibouti’s First Lady, Kadra Mahamoud Haïd, who officially launched the programme yesterday, said that it was “a route towards social progress, a tool to fulfil basic human rights, especially on integrity and dignity for girls and women.” She also noted that, since FGM is gender-based violence, the Government of Djibouti, “has set up legal and institutional mechanisms to eradicate the violence.”
(via Great News Network)
A startup based in Cambridge, MA, says that it plans to soon begin clinical trials of a nanostructured material that stops bleeding almost instantly. A startup called Arch Therapeutics has licensed the technology from MIT and is developing manufacturing processes for making it in large amounts.The new material can be poured over a site and will stop the bleeding almost at once.
The first application, pending Food and Drug Administration approval, will be for use during surgery to quickly stop bleeding and even prevent it in the first place. Floyd Loop, currently an advisor to Arch Therapeutics, and formerly a cardiovascular surgeon and the head of Cleveland Clinic, says that it could be useful in a wide variety of surgeries, including brain, heart, and prostate. For example, he says that when large tumors are removed, “there’s a lot of diffuse bleeding around the site, and you have to spend a lot of time with sponges and cautery stopping it.”
(via Grinding)
Rise of the rest
So I didn’t post much stuff last week, and I didn’t do a week in review. Sorry, been busy. I’ve also been meaning to write an overview of reasons to be hopeful, like this one form last year. I’ve found Fareed Zakaria’s article “The Rise of the Rest” does a pretty good job. This has made heavy rounds in the blogosphere since it was published, but I recommend it if you haven’t read it yet:
A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies—and the overall numbers remain small. Looking at the evidence, Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living “in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.”
[…]
The underlying reality across the globe is of enormous vitality. For the first time ever, most countries around the world are practicing sensible economics. Consider inflation. Over the past 20 years hyperinflation, a problem that used to bedevil large swaths of the world from Turkey to Brazil to Indonesia, has largely vanished, tamed by successful fiscal and monetary policies. The results are clear and stunning. The share of people living on $1 a day has plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004 and is estimated to drop to 12 percent by 2015. Poverty is falling in countries that house 80 percent of the world’s population. There remains real poverty in the world—most worryingly in 50 basket-case countries that contain 1 billion people—but the overall trend has never been more encouraging. The global economy has more than doubled in size over the last 15 years and is now approaching $54 trillion! Global trade has grown by 133 percent in the same period. The expansion of the global economic pie has been so large, with so many countries participating, that it has become the dominating force of the current era. Wars, terrorism, and civil strife cause disruptions temporarily but eventually they are overwhelmed by the waves of globalization. These circumstances may not last, but it is worth understanding what the world has looked like for the past few decades.
[…]
The United States is currently ranked as the globe’s most competitive economy by the World Economic Forum. It remains dominant in many industries of the future like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and dozens of smaller high-tech fields. Its universities are the finest in the world, making up 8 of the top ten and 37 of the top fifty, according to a prominent ranking produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Free and green. Those are the goals of a pilot program launched today by the U.S. Postal Service that allows customers to recycle small electronics and inkjet cartridges by mailing them free of charge.The “Mail Back” program helps consumers make more environmentally friendly choices, making it easier for customers to discard used or obsolete small electronics in an environmentally responsible way. Customers use free envelopes found in 1,500 Post Offices to mail back inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players – without having to pay for postage.
(via Lupa)
