EU's fiscal stability pact is coming unravelled. Considering the depths of financial chicanery practised by the Commission and EU member states, the pact is worthless. Burdened by the welfare state, colossal debt and wedded to creative accounting, EU countries are unlikely to aggressively police each other for fear of recompense. Let this be a lesson: states do not discipline themselves.

[mises] Some Pact!

Scientists have confirmed that the Opportunity Mars rover has run across a meteorite, sitting within the robot’s exploration zone at Meridiani Planum.

“We have definitive word now... it's a meteorite,” Steve Squyres, principal science investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover program told SPACE.com. Squyres is based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Mars Opportunity rover finds a meteor

The first radio station dedicated to the interests of women has been relaunched in Afghanistan.
The Voice of Women station promises to help women deal with the violence and discrimination they still face in many parts of the country.

It is expected to reach hundreds of thousands of women in the capital, Kabul, and more distant provinces.

The station was taken back on air by its director - and one of the country's most famous women - Jamileh Mujahed.

She was the first local woman broadcaster to appear on television announcing the fall of the Taleban in 2001.

Afghan Women's radio relaunched

Not exactly surprising...

Global poll slams Bush leadership

] Luckily, there's a solution: the FISH protocol. FISH
] implements an ftp-like interface over standard SSH. Since
] it interacts with the shell, it supports standard
] globbing constructs as well as completion.
]
] The protocol itself is fairly obscure, though.
] Apparently, it was originally developed as a virtual file
] system layer for Midnight Commander (a console-based file
] manager), but was later integrated with the Konqueror and
] Nautilus file managers, and is currently supported by the
] lftp program, too.
] ]
] Despite the fact that FISH has been around for almost six
] years at this point, it has not received widespread
] attention from either the user or security communities.
] It's probably time that both take a look at this nifty
] protocol. Meanwhile, I've found it to be an elegant, if
] obscure, solution to my file transfer needs, and would
] recommend giving it a try.

FISH Protocol

] Episode 78 - Cryptography (original air date: 01/11/2005)

Stankdawg's web radio program -- I was co-host for this week's episode. Check the link to download the MP3. We talked about some "Cryptography 101" stuff, including a brief overview of the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code and Kryptos. We ran out of time discussing the Cyrillic Projector, but may cover it in a future show.

Thanks to SD for inviting me!

Elonka :)

Binary Revolution - The Cryptography Episode

Since the death of his father, Akhmad-hadji Kadyrov, in a terrorist bombing on 9 May, 28-year-old Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov has emerged as the most powerful and the most feared man in Chechnya despite his lack of formal education and the alleged involvement of his security force in the systematic abduction, torture, and execution of Chechen civilians.

While Russian human rights activists decry Kadyrov’s reported involvement in human rights violations, he can seemingly do no wrong in the eyes of the Russian leadership, which has augmented his powers and bestowed on him one of the country’s most prestigious awards.

THE WARLORD AND THE COMMISSAR

IN RECENT years the mobile phone has turned into an electronic jack-of-all-trades, the remote control for everyday life, a digital equivalent of the Swiss Army knife. A modern handset can function as a digital camera, music player, radio, games console and messaging device, as well as being a phone. On January 10th, trials began in South Korea of a new service that incorporates yet another device into the handset: television. TU Media, a joint venture between SK Telecom and Toshiba, a Japanese electronics firm, began beaming three of a planned 12 mobile-TV channels to special handsets, a service for which it plans to charge subscribers $11 a month. In Europe and America, meanwhile, Nokia, the world's leading handset-maker, is also testing mobile TV services: the most elaborate trial so far, with 500 users, will start soon in the English city of Oxford, in conjunction with O2, a European operator.

TV on your phone

MOST two-term American presidents lose steam in their second four years. If scandal doesn't get them (Watergate, Iran-contra, Monica Lewinsky), weariness does. Sitting presidents rarely campaign on a revolutionary agenda, just feel-good blather: Ronald Reagan's “Morning in America”, or Bill Clinton's “Bridge to the 21st century”. And a re-elected president is a lame-duck long before his second term ends, leaving little time to get much done.

George Bush seems determined to be different. He has laid out a second-term domestic agenda more ambitious than anything seen in the first term, and that was hardly a lull. It brought the biggest tax cuts since 1981, the broadest education reform in a generation and the costliest expansion of Medicare, the state health system for the elderly, since it was set up in 1965.

If the first-term legacy is largely a deficit, the second term promises to shake some of the country's economic pillars. At the Republican convention last September, Mr Bush spoke of transforming America's fundamental economic institutions for the 21st century, and offered two broad organising themes. The first was to make the United States the best place in the world to do business. That covered changes from tort reform (fewer burdensome lawsuits) to a simpler tax code, spurring more economic growth. The second theme was to foster an “ownership society”, by giving individuals greater control over, and responsibility for, their own health care and pensions. In particular, it meant restructuring Social Security, America's public pension system, by basing it partly on private accounts.

Empty campaign promises? Not so. At his post-election press conference, the president left no doubt that he regarded his victory as a mandate for reform. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital”, he said, “and now I intend to spend it.”

George Bush's second term

DARMSTADT, Germany -- The first pictures revealing the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan, were shown from Europe's Huygens probe showing what look like drainage channels on the surface of what until today has been a planet totally hidden from view.

The first image, taken from an altitude of 16 kilometers, has a ground resolution of about 40 meters, said Martin Tomasko, principal investigator for Huygens' Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR). Tomasko said that Huygens research teams now have about 350 pictures to work with. [Scroll to the bottom of this story to see raw image files of the Titan descent taken by Huygens. All images courtesy of ESA/NASA/University of Arizona.]

Huygens Probe Returns First Images of Titan's Surface