Possible, certainly. The real question is, how likely such collisions are. Many things are possible (e.g. you getting hit by a falling meteorite) but are ignored as too unlikely.
Collisions between satellites are indeed unlikely, but their likelihood increases rapidly with the number of satellites: increase the number of satellites 10 times and, other things being equal, the likelihood of collision grows 100-fold.
It all depends on the orbits of course. Most satellites move in low-altitude Earth orbit, 600-1000 kilometer above the ground. At any times, this space is filled by thousands of pieces of matter–satellites, rocket stages, cast-off pieces of hardware (like weights used to slow down satellite spin), etc., about 100,000 pieces, most of them fragments from exploding rockets, but also including some 7500 larger accountable pieces of space hardware. Space is huge, but all these are moving rapidly. Luckily, all motions are essentially in the same direction (west to east, chosen to take advantage of the Earth’s rotation) with almost the same speed. Even so, that speed is enormous, and collisions still may occur, since the orbits make different angles with the Earth’s equator.
So far, the problem is not serious. One definite collision has been recorded in July 1996. The French satellite Cerise, launched in 1995, collided with debris from a 1986 launch, and broke off a stabilizing boom. In this case it was soon noted that the satellite had lost orientation and control was reestablished. Fine grains of debris occasionally hit the space shuttle, leaving impact marks in the heat tiles and even in the windows; to avoid damage to the sensitive front of the shuttle, at times when no reason exists to do otherwise, it flies tail-first. A “ding” 1/16 inch across, in a window of the shuttle, may be seen here.
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and now …

Russian and US satellites collide

US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in what is thought to be the biggest incident of its kind to date.
The US commercial Iridium spacecraft hit a defunct Russian satellite at an altitude of about 800km (500 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.
The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for later this month is said to be low.
The impact produced a cloud of debris, which will be tracked into the future.
Since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, it is estimated about 6,000 satellites have been put in orbit.
Satellite operators are all too aware that the chances of a collision are increasing.
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By Gene Warner

Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.
Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.
“He came to the police station at 6:20 p.m. [Thursday] and told us that she was dead,” Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz said late this morning.
Muzzammil Hassan told police that his wife was at his business, Bridges TV, on Thorn Avenue in the village. Officers went to that location and discovered her body.
Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.
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(submitted by a reader)

The chimp who outwits humans; the dolphin who says it with seaweed; the existential dog
By Steve Connor

An elephant that never forgets its extended family, a chimp that can outperform humans in a sophisticated test of visual memory and an amorous male dolphin that likes to say it with flowers well, a clump of river weeds to be more precise. These are just some of the recent observations from the field of animal behaviour. They appear to show that there is no limit to the intelligence of animals, but what do we really know about the true cognitive powers of the non-human brain?

Experiments on wild elephants living in Kenya found that individuals can remember the whereabouts of at least 17 family members, and possibly even as many as 30. Tests in a laboratory in Japan found that chimps, and young chimps especially, have an incredible photographic memory. Finally, there was the story of the romantic river dolphins of Brazil. Males collected river weeds, sticks or even lumps of clay in their mouths to act as a form of sexual display to prospective mates. Scientists are convinced that it is not merely playful behaviour but a serious attempt at wooing the opposite sex with the cetacean equivalent of a Valentine’s gift surely a sign of emotional intelligence.
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By Albert, Michael

The economy is a shambles. True, from the perspective of the poor, it was also a shambles before the current crisis, but things are now so discombobulated that even stratospheric penthouses are leaking cash. Collapse beckons. Urgency dictates policy. Contending constituencies will request, demand, and even battle for changes. Policies will ensue. The question is not will they happen, but will they be good or bad?

One approach to deciding is to look at each proposal entirely on its own but it turns out that examining proposals and actions this way tends to push us into a narrow frame of thinking that assesses merit on very narrow terms defined by the proposers of proposals themselves, which is often elites at the top of society. More, this case by case approach focuses on what on aspects highlighted in general discussions, in turn dictated by media, in turn owned by the proposals proposers. To the forefront gallops the goal of getting the economy “back in shape.” Avoid meltdown. Good is reducing or preventing economic travail while getting the economy back to an even keel. Bad is not doing enough to reduce or even better prevent economic travail, while getting the economy back to an even keel. Worse, economic travail is defined by diverse pundits to mean continued decline of profit making prospects. And “an even keel”? What does that mean? Well, that is the real problem, because what the media call an “even keel” is really a lopsided mess that imposes a constant calamity on those who don’t inhabit penthouses, and getting back to that isn’t really all that much of a gain.
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A Sworn Foe of Single-Payer

By VICENTE NAVARRO

President Obama has put forward the name of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the well-known chief medical correspondent for CNN, for the position of surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service – the chief public health officer of the federal government. Dr. Gupta has received wide acclaim as the most important voice on medical matters in the U.S. broadcasting industry. And CNN has played an important role in developing and promulgating the U.S. establishment’s conventional wisdom on what is happening in the country’s medical care. Dr. Gupta has been a major force in the promotion of that wisdom.

It is important that before discussing the appropriateness of President Obama’s choice for surgeon general, I make a few points about the role of the mainstream media, including CNN, in the country’s affairs, in particular, in its major international and domestic conflicts – that is, conflicts not only in, for example, Iraq and Vietnam, but also at home.
As we know, in the buildup to and conduct of the Iraq war, the mainstream media played a crucial role – supporting the invasion and occupation, and uncritically reproducing the Bush administration’s justification for this intervention. The mainstream media considered it their primary role to promote the conventional wisdom on this war, and not to challenge or question it. Not until 4,226 Americans and 654,965 Iraqis had been killed did CNN and the other mainstream media start questioning President Bush’s and the establishment’s justifications for the Iraq War. And it is important to remember that, before reaching this point, CNN and the other mainstream media had consistently ignored, marginalized, or ridiculed those voices that were explaining how the justifications for war had no credibility.

This series of events was nothing new. The same thing had happened with the Vietnam War. This reality on the role of the mainstream media is well known both in the U.S. and abroad. A primary function of the U.S. broadcasting industry is to reproduce the establishment’s position on whatever conflict the country is involved in at the time.

But not so well known is the mainstream media’s (including CNN’s) role in the wars at home.
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Submitted by reader

Trailer for Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece, Battle of Algiers.

Battle of Algiers – Click here to see Part 1 of 13

When resentment of French rule in Algeria grew amongst the part of the population who felt they were treated like a colonized people in comparisson to the settlers of European origin (pieds-noirs) a vicious cycle of violence started between French forces and the pro-independence FLN (National Liberation Front) hitting civilians too. More and more people would join the resistance, be it in the form of physical force or civil disobedience …

Despite 99% DNA similarity between humans and our nearest relative, chimpanzees, the locations of DNA swapping between chromosomes, known as recombination hotspots, are almost entirely different. The surprising finding is reported in a paper just published online in Science by Oxford University statisticians and US and Dutch geneticists.

This difference is intriguing because one of the central tenets of modern biology is that specific DNA sequences determine biological function. In most cases, when DNA sequence is highly similar between two species, the biological function of that DNA is predictably similar as well.

Recombination shapes the patterns of genetic variation in a species.It is the process by which genetic information inherited from a person’s two parents is mixed up to make one chromosome to pass on to their offspring. Chromosomes exist in pairs, with one chromosome of the pair inherited from the father, the other from the mother. At the point when sperm or eggs are made, the paired chromosomes line up and exchange pieces of DNA, recombining into a totally new, single chromosome, which is passed on to offspring.

In a previous study in Science, the Oxford team had identified many ‘hotspots’ along the human genome where this swapping of DNA is more likely to occur. Why these hotspots occur, and what triggers the swapping of DNA at those particular points, is a mystery. One theory was that the DNA code either side of hotspots controlled the activity. However, when the researchers compared chimps and humans for the new study, they were startled to find that despite being so genetically similar, the species have totally different recombination hotspots.

Professor Peter Donnelly at Oxford said: ‘If chimps and humans do not share these recombination hotspots, then it means something other than the surrounding DNA code must be controlling the process of recombination – because the surrounding DNA code in chimps and humans is pretty much identical. This means that recombination is even more mysterious than we already thought: what is controlling it, and why does it occur so often at these particular places?
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By Saree Makdisi

In three weeks of incessant bombardment, Israel killed or injured more than 6,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and a third of them children.

It pushed the territory it has militarily controlled for four decades (and for the welfare of whose population international law holds it legally accountable) even deeper into deliberately engineered, even fine-tuned, misery.

It wrecked much of what was left of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure after months of siege and years of isolation from the outside world; it smashed thousands of family homes, schools, offices and mosques; it obliterated the personal property of tens of thousands of refugees — many of whom have now lost two or three homes in succession to Israeli bombs.

Israel’s primary justification for the bombardment of Gaza was that it was intended to stop Palestinian rockets fired into Israeli territory.
But Israel failed to accomplish a single one of its declared objectives. It failed to stop the firing of rockets from Gaza. It failed to stop smuggling across the Egypt-Gaza border. And it failed, even in the short run, to bring security to Israel’s own population.

If anything, the bombardment of Gaza left Hamas stronger than ever, for having stood up to three weeks of bombardment and preventing the Israeli army from translating its overwhelming firepower superiority into actual accomplishments on the battlefield — of which there were none, other than crude destruction.
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(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)