Newsmania

Who cares what the US says, we want human rights!

The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to create a new human rights organisation for the world body, despite United States criticism.

The 47-nation UN Human Rights Council will replace the current 53-country UN Human Rights Commission.

The existing body has been heavily criticised for having countries with poor human rights records as members.

The US voted against the plan, saying the reforms did not go far enough, but pledged to work with the new council.

Nurse: yes, and would you like me to implant your records in your arm or in your nose?

The two D.C. residents are among just a handful of Americans who have had the tiny electronic VeriChip inserted since the government approved it two years ago. But the chip is being aggressively marketed by its manufacturer, which is targeting Washington to be the first metropolitan area with multiple hospitals equipped to read the device, a persuasive factor for Fischer and Hickey. Within weeks, the first hospital is expected to announce plans to start routinely scanning all emergency-room patients.

Some doctors are welcoming the technology as an exciting innovation that will speed care and prevent errors. But the concept alarms privacy advocates. They worry the devices could make it easier for unauthorized snoops to invade medical records. They also fear that the technology marks a dangerous step toward an Orwellian future in which people will be monitored using the chips or will be required to have them inserted for surveillance.

A round of appluase...for us!

The number of bloggers - people who write online journals - topped 30m this week, according to technorati.com, the search engine that monitors activity of this kind. This may give an exaggerated idea of the size of the global blogosphere because a lot of people have more than one website and others are inactive. But it does suggest that a milestone may have been passed and that blogging is graduating from being a minority sport to a mainstream activity.

A neo-con turns on his buddies

"America at the Crossroads" serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and the role that neoconservative ideas — concerning preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action — played in shaping the decision to go to war, its implementation and its aftermath. These arguments are made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself, who studied with or was associated with leading neoconservative luminaries like Paul D. Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and Allan Bloom, and whose best-selling 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man," was celebrated (and denounced) as a classic neoconservative text on the end of the cold war and the global march of liberal democracy.

Sleeping pill or midnight snack pill?

The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.

The next morning, the night eaters remember nothing about their foraging. But they wake up to find telltale clues: mouthfuls of peanut butter, Tostitos in their beds, kitchen counters overflowing with flour, missing food, and even lighted ovens and stoves. Some are so embarrassed, they delay telling anyone, even as they gain weight.

[technorati tags: human rights, health, technology, neoconservatives, Iraq war, bloggers]