Bemused Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel confronted by topless Femen protester in Hanover

Vladimir Putin appears to have at last found a form of anti-government protest that he can support.

The Russian president was confronted by a topless protester with an obscene slogan insulting Mr Putin painted on her back - and, he admitted, he “liked” it.

Mr Putin was with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at at a trade fair in Hanover when the woman tried to push her way through to an amused-looking Mr Putin, but was blocked by aides. Her back was painted with an obscene slogan in Cyrillic script directed against the Russian president.

The activist was with two other women who also stripped to the waist and shouted slogans calling the Russian leader a “dictator”.

The women appeared to be members of the feminist group Femen, which has staged topless protests against the sex industry and religious institutions.

Speaking at a press conference afterwards, Mr Putin said: “As for the protest, I liked it. In principle, we knew that such a protest was being prepared.”

He said the organisers of the Hanover event should “say thank you to the Ukrainian girls, they helped you promote the trade fair.”

He added: “To be honest, I didn’t really hear what they were shouting because the security [guards] were very tough. These huge guys fell on the lasses. That seemed not right to me, they could have been handled more gently.”

Mr Putin appeared to show a flash of his well-known salty humour, adding: “I didn’t make out whether they were blondes, chestnut-haired or brunettes.”

The Russian president said protests by Femen activists were nothing new. “We’ve all got used to these demonstrations and I don’t see anything terrible here,” he said.

However, he added: “If someone wants to debate political questions, then it’s better to do it clothed rather than getting undressed. You should undress in other places, such as on nudist beaches.”

On their Facebook page, Femen said the protest was an “anti-dictatorial attack on Putin”. The group criticised the Kremlin, Russia’s Federal Security Service and the Russian Orthodox Church, saying that Femen was against “dictatorship, homophobia and theocracy”.

Femen protests have included burning a Salafist flag in front of the Grand Mosque in Paris, and chopping down an Orthodox cross with a chainsaw.

The group has criticized Mr Putin over the arrest and conviction of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral last year.

Russia has urged German authorities to punish the protesters. “This is ordinary hooliganism and unfortunately it happens all over the world, in any city. One needs to punish (them),” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The trade fair in Hanover, which opened on Sunday, features exhibitors from more than 60 countries. Relations between Russia and Germany have come under strain recently over the Kremlin’s harsh line on opposition groups and non-governmental organisations, including raids on the offices of two German NGOs in Moscow and St Petersburg.

At the opening of the fair on Sunday, Mrs Merkel that Moscow should give “non-governmental organizations - the many groups that we in Germany know as motors of innovation - a good chance in Russia.”

Mr Putin was in Hanover to open the fair, where Russia has a pavilion, and hold talks with Mrs Merkel.

Later on Monday he will travel to Holland. He is expected to be met by gay rights activists protesting over recently introduced Russian legislation which bans “homosexual propaganda” among minors. The law, in effect in several regions, has been widely criticised as homophobic.

Source: The Telegraph

George Carlin Interviewed by Jon Stewart

Mobile Phones: Greatest Tool of the Surveillance State

Scientists Can Pluck Images Out Of Your Dreams

Sweet Dreams Sima Dimitric

With just an fMRI, an algorithm, and the internet, researchers from Kyoto, Japan predicted with 60 percent accuracy what a person was dreaming about, Smithsonian magazine reports. The idea, like the process, isn't all that complicated: Our brains react measurably differently to different stimuli: looking at a book or a building doesn't cause the same reaction. So the Kyoto team had three people sleep in an fMRI for three-hour stints over 10 days, and hooked them up to an EEG, which used electrical signals from the body to track which stage of sleep the were in were in.

Early on, just a few minutes after falling asleep, dreams started coming in bursts. The scientists woke the subjects up soon after and asked them what they saw. (For each participant, they actually did that 200 times, presumably turning them into the Grumpiest People In The Universe.) The researchers wrote down the 20 most common things the subjects saw: people, buildings, etc. They then found images on the internet that matched those common things, showed them to the subjects while they were awake but still in the fMRI, and took a reading. That information was fed into a learning algorithm. When the subjects slept again, the algorithm spit back this '80s music video-like representation of what the sleepers saw.

The biggest words at the bottom are the algorithm's predictions of what the dreamer is seeing. When the researchers woke up the subjects again and asked what they saw, the algorithm was right 60 percent of the time. It was better at distinguishing between, say, a scene, like a street, and a person, but it couldn't guess specifically if the "scene" was of a building or something else. Still, 60 percent, even though it might not be high enough to do much other research with, is unexplainable by chance.

In 2011, we reported on a study from another team that's reminiscent of this one. The researchers in that study pulled off a similar trick by scanning subjects' (awake) brains to reconstruct a video clip they'd watched. (We took an even deeper look at the process, actually, back in 2010.) This study is similar, but the researchers say it's the first time the contents of a dream have been plucked from a sleeper's head. So even if the team was only able to do it with a relatively low 60 percent accuracy, the technique is probably just going to get better from here.

target="_blank">Source: Popsci

Is Hemp a Miracle Plant That Can Save the World?

Hemp is perhaps the answer to most problems in the world. Ambitious, yes.  An exaggeration, no.

If grown extensively, its diverse uses can be of significant value to the environment, the economy, world hunger, personal health, and so much more.

For the environment, hemp can reduce deforestation, pesticide use, provide a sustainable biofuel, and replace GMO cotton among other benefits. It grows like a weed without the need for pesticides or heavy fertilizers.

Hemp does just about anything wood can do and it only takes 6 months to renew, not 20 years. It can be used to make paper, to build homes with, and as fuel for fire.

Hemp clothing is far more durable than cotton, which is an industry still operating a form of slavery from cultivation to production. GMO cotton has led to indentured servitude for Indian farmers where failed crops and debt result in shockingly high suicide rates. Hemp is simply a better material for clothing.

The oil in the hemp seed can be made into biodiesel just like any vegetable oil. Most arguments against biofuels are that their crops take up too much valuable farm land that should be used for food, and it takes more energy than it gives back when all things are considered (fertilizer, pesticides, planting and harvesting machinery, refining).

With hemp, biofuel is merely a bi-product of this crop, not it's main use. The fiber of the plant is still an extremely valuable commodity. Whereas corn ethanol needs a lot of land with tons of intensive chemicals, and the process of turning corn into ethanol is then a net energy loss.

As today's economy falters due to a variety of systematic problems, the world is in desperate need of a new industry. Worldwide hemp legalization and promotion would lead to a revolution in nearly all major industries. Entrepreneurs would have a field day with textiles, plastics, body care, construction, etc.

Industrial hemp's female counterpart, marijuana, provides effective natural medicine for a number of ailments. Cannabis is one of mankind's oldest recorded healing plants. As its prohibition lessens, modern man is only just beginning to discover the exciting medical uses of marijuana, which are provably vast already.

Cannabis can ease pain, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, PTSD, arthritis, and has even been proven to have anti-cancerous properties. When eaten or vaporized, cannabis is entirely beneficial as a natural alternative because any unwanted tars are not inhaled. Furthermore, juicing raw cannabis has many benefits and zero psychoactive effects.

Hemp alone is powerful enough to be a game changer for the environment and for human society as a whole. It's time to unleash the hemp seed.

Please watch the very entertaining video about how hemp can save the world and share this information with everyone you know.

Source: Activist Post

Venus Syndrome: The Life Ending Effects of Geoengineering

A very good interview, informative.

BP to Ask Judge Today to Halt Spill Settlement Payments

BP Plc (BP/) is seeking to block the administrator handling its $8.5 billion settlement over the 2010 oil spill from paying certain claims, contending his decisions may cost the company billions more than expected.

The company is scheduled to ask U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans for an injunction halting certain payments at a hearing today. Settlement administrator Patrick Juneau’s decisions have already exposed BP “to hundreds of millions of dollars in fictitious ‘losses’ that were never contemplated by the agreement,” the London-based oil company said in court papers last month.

“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” BP said in the filing.

The blowout of BP’s deep-water Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana sent more than 4 million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 people. The accident sparked hundreds of lawsuits against London-based BP, Transocean (RIG) Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and Halliburton Co. (HAL), which provided cement services.

BP reached a settlement last year resolving most economic and medical-injury claims by private parties. The company estimated at the time that the settlement would cost $7.8 billion. BP raised the estimate to $8.5 billion in February, citing the dispute with Juneau.

Similar Request

Today’s hearing comes exactly one month after Barbier rejected a similar request from BP to halt payments by the administrator. The judge ruled March 5 that the settlement agreement required the interpretation of claims that Juneau has been using.

“BP’s interpretation injects a subjective notion of alternative causation and a degree of complexity that are contrary to the settlement’s terms,” Barbier said in his ruling last month.

BP was aware that the terms of the settlement agreement could produce “false positives,” Barbier said, citing a letter from a company executive to Juneau in September.

Such results are an “inevitable concomitant of an objective, quantitative, data-based test,” BP lawyer Mark Holstein said in the letter, according to Barbier.

BP has appealed that decision and filed a separate lawsuit against Juneau and the Deepwater Horizon Court Supervised Settlement Program over payments. Today’s hearing considers both the injunction request and the new lawsuit.

BP last night asked Barbier to put a hold on payments until its appeal of his order is heard.

‘Not Harmed’

“Granting a stay pending appeal will inflict little or no harm on claimants as they are not harmed by forgoing undeserved payments,” company lawyers said in a filing.

A nonjury trial over liability for the spill and explosion began before Barbier Feb. 25 in federal court in New Orleans. Barbier will determine responsibility for the disaster and whether any of the companies acted with willful or wanton misconduct or reckless indifference -- the legal requirement for establishing gross negligence.

Last year’s settlement didn’t include damage claims by financial institutions, casinos and companies claiming harm from the Obama administration’s deep-water drilling moratorium, which was imposed after the spill. It also didn’t include claims by the U.S. government and the states of Louisiana and Alabama.

Lawyers suing the company claim BP underestimated the cost of the settlement.

‘Uncapped Nature’

“The uncapped nature of the potential payments was a seminal feature of the settlement agreement,” victims’ lawyers said in an April 1 filing. “Simply because the value of the overall payments in certain industries exceeds what BP estimated does not make the individual claims ‘fictitious,’” they said.

Juneau ruled that he would measure revenue when it was received rather than when it was earned, BP complained last month. This meant that a contractor filing a claim could show a “fictitious” decline in revenue, “even though it earned the same amount for the same job performed one year earlier,” the company said.

BP said Juneau’s “rewriting” stretched the settlement accord to include claims the oil company never contemplated paying. The company said the “non-existent losses are most prevalent” in the agriculture, construction, professional services, real estate, manufacturing, wholesale trade and retail industries.

BP said two-thirds of all business economic-loss payments larger than $75,000 have been based on “flawed data.” The company also contends that more than 1,200 payments have been made to claimants in the agriculture, construction and professional services industries that are too remote from the area impacted by the spill to qualify for compensation.

Economic Loss

BP is protesting a structure for payments of economic loss that it knew about and accepted, victims’ lawyers said in court papers. Claimants are using comparable months to determine losses, as per the settlement, and counting revenue when they receive it, the lawyers contend.

“The injunction BP seeks would itself violate the express terms of the settlement and trust agreements that BP negotiated, agreed to, and supported,” the victims’ lawyers said in the April 1 filing. “BP is effectively asking the court to enjoin itself.”

The case is In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, 10-md-02179, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).

Source: Bloomberg