Following the First Steps out of Africa

Stephan:  This is what is great about science. Men and women who like solving these kinds of problems just beaver away at them and, eventually, explanatory data is refined, and you get real insight. Taken as a whole it is an amazing saga of exploration, generation upon generation.

The timing and pattern of the migration of early modern humans has been a source of much debate and research. Now, a new study uses genetic analysis to look for clues about the migration of the first modern humans who moved out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago. The research, published January 26 by Cell Press in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the official journal of the American Society of Human Genetics, provides intriguing insight into the earliest stages of human migration and suggests that modern humans settled in Arabia on their way from the Horn of Africa to the rest of the world.

‘A major unanswered question regarding the dispersal of modern humans around the world concerns the geographical site of the first steps out of Africa,’ explains senior study author, Dr. Luísa Pereira from the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto in Portugal (IPATIMUP). ‘One popular model predicts that the early stages of the dispersal took place across the Red Sea to southern Arabia, but direct genetic evidence has been thin on the ground.’

The work, led by Dr. Pereira at IPATMUP and Professor Martin Richards at the University of Leeds in the […]

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FDA Staffers Sue Agency Over Surveillance of Personal E-mail

Stephan:  This is further evidence of the paranoia and obsessive control trend which is eating away at our cultural gut. When one set of bureaucrats place another set of bureaucrats under surveillance, mistrust and cover your ass, very quickly becomes the culture under which everyone operates. Nothing innovative can ever happen. This is one of the things the killed the Soviet Union. People don't innovate under surveillance. This is happening just at a time when more than ever we need and should nurture people who innovate.

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance – detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week – took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.

Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.

FDA computers post a warning, visible when users log on, that they should have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy

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Black Gold for the GOP

Stephan:  A profile of a man who loves Citizens United, and works it for all its worth -- literally.

One evening this past October, I went prospecting for natural-gas man Trevor Rees-Jones at the posh Hilton Anatole in Dallas. He was there to receive the Robert S. Folsom Leadership Award, a philanthropic prize that in recent years has gone to the likes of Laura Bush and former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman. Unlike these prominent Texans, Rees-Jones is not widely known outside his hometown. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he shares it with the British bodyguard who survived Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. The Trevor Rees-Jones that I came to see is the billionaire founder of Dallas-based Chief Oil & Gas and perhaps the fastest-rising star in Republican big-money circles.

The dinner’s PR people had promised me tickets, then changed their minds and, with apologies, yanked them. So I called up my sister, a Dallas debutante of recent vintage, to help me crash the thing. As we strolled through the Hilton’s cave-like lobby in cocktail attire, we saw a troop of young Boy Scouts milling about. One of them inquired about our destination and then helpfully directed us to the event’s open bar. An Eagle Scout himself, Rees-Jones has donated millions of dollars to scouting causes.

A few days […]

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Canada: Climate Criminal

Stephan:  SR reader Rex Weyler has written an excellent take on what is going on in Canada, a country being taken over by corporate interests. He told me, 'Canada has gone for fascist right wing, Bush-Reagan-Thatcher style strong-arm corporate government. this is because Canada became a petrol-state .. like Nigeria .. the oil companies now run Canada -- Shell, Sinopec, Imperial, etc . -- mostly Chinese dollars to dig up tar sands to run china's power plants for next century. 'But we are making huge progress in stopping ALL THREE major pipeline projects from the tar sands: Keystone, Enbridge, and Kinder Morgan. We're working closely with the First Nations in Canada. Oil companies have a lot of money, but not much soul.' This is an example of what people can and must do if they wish to preserve a society focused on wellness instead of profit.

At the dawn of the 21st century a new political regime has transformed Canada from global hero – once standing up for peace, people, and nature – to global criminal, plunging into war, eroding civil rights, and destroying environments.

What happened to Canada? Oil. And not just any oil, but the world’s dirtiest, most destructive oil. Canada’s betrayal at the Durban climate talks – abandoning its Kyoto Accord commitments – is the direct effect of becoming a petro-state.

By the late 20th century, oil companies knew that the world’s conventional oil fields were in decline and oil production would soon peak, which it did in 2005. These companies, including sovereign oil powers such as PetroChina, turned their attention to low-grade hydrocarbon deposits in shale gas, deep offshore fields, and Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Simultaneously, inside Canada, oil companies began promoting the political career of the son of an Alberta oil executive, the conservative ideologue Stephen Harper.

Shell Oil opened operations in the tar sands in 2003. In 2004, the same year Canada signed the Kyoto Accord, committing to reduce carbon emissions, oil companies began to form ‘think tanks

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Mendocino County to Lose Marijuana Permit Income

Stephan:  This is the wrong way to go. All this is going to do is pit the sheriff against the local people. A relationship that was beginning to heal because suddenly it was in everyone's interest for the growing of marijuana to be policed and controlled and a stable business like wine grapes in Nappa. The growers were attempting to do with medical marijuana what the vintners had done further south. Just as wine makers have developed Merlots and Cabs, growers were beginning to specialize in strains particularly good for pain, nausea, or stress reduction. Cannabis is a sophisticated and complex plant with many gifts. Now it will go back to the Mexico Mafia, and there will be an increase of violence and death.

UKIAH, CA — A major source of funding for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department is going up in smoke over the county’s decision to cancel a medical marijuana permit program.

County officials have calculated the sheriff’s department will be losing more than a half-million dollars in revenue after the Board of Supervisors voted last week to end the program of issuing permits to cannabis collectives.

The permits allowed the collectives to grow up the 99 plants at a time, but also required deputies to conduct monthly inspections.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports ( http://bit.ly/wcIAIY) that sheriff’s officials collected $663,230 last year in fees for the inspections.

Despite the loss of revenue, Sheriff Tom Allman says he doesn’t expect to have to lay off any deputies.

Supervisors voted to stop issuing the permits after representatives from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag’s office warned that Mendocino’s law was at odds with federal law.

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