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The Darwinius masillae fossil recovered was about 58 centimetres long from head to tail, with a body and head length of about 24 centimetres. The scientists studying it said was a juvenile and likely under one year of age. (PLoS)

Scientists on Tuesday unveiled fossilized remains of one of the oldest and most complete skeletons of an early primate, a finding they say could further our understanding of what our own ancestors might have looked like.

The now-extinct primate lived on the earth some 47 million years ago in the Eocene period.

The creature, nicknamed Ida after University of Oslo researcher Jorn Hurum’s six-year-old daughter, was a female with four legs and a tail. It appears to be about nine or 10 months of age and was just under 60 centimetres from its head to the tip of its tail, the scientists said.
It is not a direct ancestor to humans or monkeys, but it did share some characteristics with higher primates worth examining, they said.

The primate, called Darwinius masillae, died at the margin of a volcanic lake in a rain forest in a region about 20 kilometres south of modern-day Frankfurt, Germany, near the town of Messel.
“We do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid, but the adapoid primates it represents deserve more careful comparison with higher primates than they have received in the past,” they wrote in the scientific journal PLoS One.

The fossil is also so well preserved that the scientists studying it believe its detail will help inform future discoveries of other primates from that era.

“She tells so many stories. We have just started the research on this fabulous specimen,” said Hurum, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum.

Private collectors first unearthed the fossil in 1983 and split and eventually sold two parts of the skeleton on separate plates.

CBC for more

Maternity Leave Directive – European Women’s Lobby expresses deep disappointment in the aftermath of the EP non-vote and appeals to the electorate to vote for more women in the future European Parliament

The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) expresses its deep disappointment at the way in which the Estrela report to improve provisions for pregnant women workers, those that have recently given birth and/or breastfeeding was addressed at the last plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday – 6 May.
“Women have joined the labour market in unprecedented numbers in the last decade and made a substantial contribution to the economic development of the European Union. The labour market is no longer the exclusive domain of men. Pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding are specific to women and must be mirrored in labour market regulations, laws and protection measures and policies”, stated Brigitte Triems, EWL President. “The European Parliament had the opportunity to send a strong message to women workers of the European Union regarding their right to a decent maternity leave provision, fully paid and protection from dismissal on returning to work. Men, along with partners of women who have recently given birth, were also being given the possibility of availing of paternity/co-maternity leave, as a right and not at the discretion of employers providing a golden opportunity to pave the way towards equality between women and men in their responsibilities as parents.”
While maternity provisions currently vary within the Member States the proposed Estrela report provided the opportunity to ensure that all women workers in Europe, including those in atypical forms of employment, would be guaranteed equal provisions in terms of duration, full pay and protection from dismissal on returning to work.
“This is a missed opportunity that shows more so than ever that a critical mass of women is needed in the name of democracy for the future legislature of the new European Parliament,” stated Myria Vassiliadou, EWL Secretary General. “Issues that relate to women’s lives, such as maternity protection, have a far greater chance of becoming political priorities when more women are sitting at the decision-making table.”
By refusing to vote on the Estrela report, the current European Parliament at the end of its mandate has failed women. “We can only now look to the future, draw conclusions from the current state of play and invite the electorate to carefully think about the type of European Union we want. Europe belongs to us all and that includes women”, stated Ms Vassiliadou.
European Women’s Lobby for more

(Saudi Arabia)
By David Gardner (New Statesman)

Saudi Arabia has become a laboratory of jihad, spreading poison throughout the Muslim world. Can reform save the land of the Prophet from extremism?

At the end of last month, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, son of the founder of Saudi Arabia and half-brother to its present king, made an astonishing call for reform. “We cannot use the same tools we have been using to rule the country [from] a century ago,” he told the Financial Times. “This region is roiling with turmoil and radicalism and the aspirations of a young population, and I’m afraid we are not prepared for that.”

The prince has long been a dissonant voice in a family that frowns on public dissidence, and has no decision-making power. But his words speak to a fundamental battle taking place behind the guarded walls of the kingdom’s palaces. Will King Abdullah’s tentative steps towards reform, attempting to take back control of the judiciary, education and the religious police (the notorious mutawa) from reactionary clerics, continue? Or will the king’s recent appointment of Prince Nayef, the arch-conservative interior minister, as deputy prime minister and third in line to the throne, bring them to a halt?

For the problem facing this absolutist monarchy, which has managed to function both as the custodian of the birthplace of Islam and as a US ally sitting on a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves, is not its immediate overthrow. (It has already seen off a proto-insurgency by al-Qaeda followers.) It is that the very basis of the House of Saud’s legitimacy, the fusion of temporal and religious power which forms the bedrock of the Saudi state, rests on its alliance with the House of Ibn Abdul Wahhab. And Wahhabism, the puritan faith formulated by this 18th-century religious reformer, is, in its essentials, the totalitarian creed espoused by Osama Bin Laden to justify his murderous jihad.

For many years the Saudi ruling family, which is also dependent for survival on its 64-year-old alliance with the US, managed to keep any difficulties caused by its reliance on these two radically opposed sources of support concealed behind a brittle façade of modernity. All this began to change, however, after 11 September 2001.
At first the al-Saud were in denial that 15 of the 19 hijackers were their countrymen, and that the attackers had been inspired by Bin Laden, a member of one of the kingdom’s leading merchant families. A year later, Prince Nayef was still insisting to a Kuwaiti newspaper that the attacks were a Zionist plot.
…

But then turn to school textbooks, drawn up under the authority of the Wahhabi establishment. These drill into impressionable young Saudi minds the religious duty to hate all Christians and Jews as infidels, and to combat all Shias as heretics. A theology text for 14-year-olds, for instance, states that “it is the duty of a Muslim to be loyal to the believers and be the enemy of the infidels. One of the duties of proclaiming the oneness of God is to have nothing to do with his idolatrous and polytheist enemies.” The history textbooks typically emphasise the al-Saud hegemonic myth, burying any attempt to weave regional specificity or religious breadth into national identity under a suffocating narrative of Nejdi supremacy and Saudi redemption.

“It is really not very difficult to understand how we got to where we are,” says one reformist intellectual, asking rhetorically if there was any difference between the sectarian bigotry of Osama Bin Laden and the intolerant outpourings of the Wahhabi establishment. Saudi Arabia is a laboratory for jihad – that is its strategic dilemma.

While mosques and classrooms continue to spew out this fanaticism, Saudi Arabia has also been exporting these ideas for decades. Just during the reign of the late King Fahd, Riyadh claimed to have established 1,359 mosques abroad, along with 202 colleges, 210 Islamic centres and more than 2,000 schools. In addition, it episodically supported pan-Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and sponsored jihad abroad from Afghanistan to Bosnia. Jihadis were able to establish a base in Iraq partly because Wahhabi proselytisers had established bridgeheads in cities such as Mosul in the final years of Saddam Hussein’s rule.

New Statesman for more

PHNOM PENH, 7 May 2009 (IRIN) – Coming only months after Asia’s food crisis, the economic crisis has renewed food insecurity among women and children as incomes dip, even though prices have fallen, with the World Bank predicting that Cambodia will be hardest hit among Southeast Asian countries.

As of 4 May, 1kg of rice cost 2,500 riel (US$0.61), against 3,200 riel ($0.78) a year earlier, according to the Economic Institute of Cambodia.

Declining food prices are creating difficulties for farmers who need to pay off debts, raising fears that urban workers returning to the countryside will not find work in the agricultural sector.

“Back-to-back effects of, first, the high food price crisis of last year and now the economic slowdown are likely to not only create categories of new poor… but also push into deeper food insecurity the already chronically poor,” Jean-Pierre de Margerie, Cambodia country representative for the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told IRIN.

“Last year, a majority of poor households facing higher food prices had to resort to very damaging coping mechanisms such as contracting new debts or even cutting back on food consumption,” he added.

Acute malnutrition in poor urban children increased to 15.9 percent in 2008 from 9.6 percent in 2005, as poor families cut back on food expenditure, according to the 2008 Cambodia Anthropometrics Survey, released in February by the government.

More women are also forgoing proper nutrition and healthcare during pregnancy, raising the risk of death during childbirth, the UN said in its 8 April statement.

Five pregnant women die every day in labour, giving Cambodia one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Asia at 472 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the most recent government data from 2005.

Humanitarian News and Analysis

Last week, President Obama sent his FY2010 budget request to Congress and, as expected, included in it $2.775 billion in military aid for Israel, an increase of $225 million from this year’s budget.

The budget request now goes to the Senate and House Appropriations Subcommittees on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs for hearings and “mark-ups”.
This request for an increase in military aid to Israel comes despite the fact that Israel consistently misuses U.S. weapons in violation of the Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts.

During the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 3,000 Palestinian civilians who took no part in hostilities, including more than 1,000 children. During its December-January war on the Gaza Strip alone, Israel killed nearly 1,200 Palestinian non-combatants.

Especially during this acute economic crisis, is this how you want Congress to spend your taxes? If not, then take action below.

Click here for action http://endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=2002

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

Courtesy Duke University Medical Center and World Science staff

Recordings of brain cells have found that monkeys take note of missed opportunities and learn from their mistakes, scientists say.

“This is the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have ‘would-have, could-have, should-have’ thoughts,” said Ben Hayden of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., lead author of the study published in the research journal Science.

The researchers watched individual neurons in a region of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex that monitors the consequences of actions and mediates resulting changes in behavior. The monkeys were making choices that resulted in different amounts of juice as a reward.

Their task was like the TV show “Let’s Make a Deal” with the experimenters offering monkeys choices from an array of hidden rewards. During each trial, the monkeys chose from one of eight identical white squares arranged in a circle. A color beneath the white square was revealed and the monkey received the corresponding reward.

Over many weeks, the monkeys were trained to associate a high-value reward with the color green and the low-value rewards with other colors. After receiving a reward, the monkey was also shown the prizes he missed.

The researchers found that brain cells become activated in proportion to the reward—a greater reward caused a higher response. They also found that these same brain cells, called neurons, responded when monkeys saw what they missed. Most of these neurons responded the same way to a real or imagined reward.

World Science for more

Children’s Parliament Offers Disillusioned Indians a Rare Example of Clean Politics

By Emily wax (Washington Post)

Tazim Ali, 9, seen with his parents, is president of the children’s parliament. (By Pragya Krishna For The Washington Post)

The Varanasi children’s parliament drew a turnout of 95 percent in June in its first-ever elections. It provides a platform for children to voice their problems. (Courtesy Of Vishal Bharat Sansthan)
VARANASI, India, May 13 — As one of the most popular political figures in this impoverished northeastern Indian city, Tazim Ali fields round-the-clock cellphone calls about such everyday problems as child hunger, domestic violence and caste discrimination.
The only thing that’s unusual is that Tazim is 9.

He’s the 4-foot-tall president of the Varanasi children’s parliament, the first body of its kind in India, which — with 75 percent of its population younger than 35 — is one of the world’s most youthful nations. Tazim keeps his cellphone by his side all night and listens to reports of problems such as children falling down uncovered manholes, forced early marriages and sexual abuse by relatives and teachers.
“I was called recently because a 2-year-old girl didn’t have enough food. She ended up dying,” said the fourth-grader, who appears grave beyond his years with his neatly parted, wavy brown hair and ramrod-straight posture. “We can get people to pay attention to us. We brought the case to the police. They saw we were serious and didn’t want to turn children away. I think any kid who has a problem should call me.”

With its passionate leaders and reputation for prompt action, the four-member children’s parliament is not just a cute idea. It has become an example of honest, functional politics, and the excitement it inspires contrasts sharply with the disillusionment that many adults here say they feel about their politicians. Turnout in India’s month-long elections hovered below 60 percent, surprising many pundits, who had predicted that text-message campaigns, campus rallies and voter drives by Bollywood stars would propel more people to the polls.

Analysts say that many Indians deeply mistrust their political representatives, who are often referred to as bahubalis — strongmen. Nearly a quarter of the 543 elected members of Parliament have been charged with crimes, including rape and murder, according to the New Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms.

Although 880 million Indians struggle to get by on less than $2 a day, members of Parliament running for reelection this year have grown almost 300 percent richer on average since the previous poll, in 2004, according to a study of lawmakers’ assets released this week by National Election Watch, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations. The staggered voting ended Wednesday, and election results are due this weekend.
Washington Post for more

By Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch)

What is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center doing now? He’s saying that the election of a black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! Send money!

Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make money selling the notion there’s been a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used the election of a black president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace, ripely endowed with millions to battle the legions of the cross.

Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees’ solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,” with $120 million in assets.
As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.

The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell by about $50 million last year, meaning that like almost all non profits the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash. So what was thr end result of all that relentless hoarding down the year, as people of modest means, scared by Dees, sent him their contributions. Were they put to good use? It doesn’t seem so. They vanished in an electronic blip.

But where are the haters? That hardy old stand-by, the KKK, despite the SPLC’s predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book Race Traitor, there isn’t a public school in any county in the USA that doesn’t represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there aren’t many such schools that probably haven’t been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC’s “tolerance” programs. What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance?

Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: it’s their staple.

The SPLC’s latest “Year in Hate” report claims that “in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since 2000.” The SPLC doesn’t measure the number of members in the groups, meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. I’m a hate group, meaning in Dees-speak, “one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,” starting with Dick Cheney. I love to dream of him being water-boarded, subjected to loops of Schonberg played at top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nation’s haters are mostly like me, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed) constitutionally guaranteed right to hate, solitary, disorganized, prone to sickening relapses into love, or at least the sort of amiable tolerance for All Mankind experienced when looking at photos of Carla Bruni and Princess Letizia of Spain kissing.

The effective haters are big, powerful easily identifiable entities. Why is Dees fingering militia men in a potato field in Idaho when we have identifiable, well-organized groups which the SPLC could take on. To cite reports from the Urban League, and United for a Fair Economy, minorities are more than three times as likely to hold high-cost subprime loans, foisted on them by predatory lenders, meaning the big banks; “all black and latino subprime borrowers could stand to lose between $164 billion and $213 billion for loans taken during the past eight years.”

Get those bankers and big mortgage touts into court, chief counsel Dees! How about helping workers fired by people who hate anyone trying to organize a union? What about defending immigrants rounded up in ICE raids? How about attacking the roots of southern poverty, and the system that sustains that poverty as expressed in the endless prisons and Death Rows across the south, disproportionately crammed with blacks and Hispanics?

You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like Stephen Bright, who makes only $11,000 as president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center’s director makes less than $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about $1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue. Bright’s outfit is basically dedicated to two things: prison litigation and the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. Not the phony targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional system of oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC’s tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your check to Dees and send it to Bright,( http://www.schr.org/) or to the Institute for Southern Studies (http://www.southernstudies.org.html) run by Chris Kromm, which has been doing brilliant spadework on the economy, on poverty and on exploitation in the south for four decades.

Counterpunch for more

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty

By Robert Draper (GQ)

ON THE MORNING OF Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” (To see these and more Bush-administration intelligence cover sheets, visit http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

GQ for more