A human rights legal group says Australia is breaching its international obligations by sending a group of asylum seekers to Nauru for processing. The Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, today announced the transfer of more than 80 Sri Lankan men currently being held on Christmas Island. Mr Andrews says the move will deter people smugglers and potential asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. The spokeswoman from the group Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Eve Lester, says the Government’s policy is contrary to the United Nations convention on refugees
Thousands of Australians who use internet auction sites like eBay are facing a tax probe into their GST compliance. Online auction sites have been asked by the Australian Tax Office to provide information about sellers who turn over more than $50,000 a year
Whether YouTube suffers the same fate as Napster may depend on the wording of a nearly antique law written long before video-sharing web sites were envisioned
Future spacecraft may surf the magnetic fields of Earth and other planets, taking previously unfeasible routes around the solar system, according to a proposal funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts. The electrically charged craft would not need rockets or propellant of any kind. Mason Peck of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US, has received a grant to study the idea, which is based on the fact that magnetic fields exert forces on electrically charged objects. He says a satellite could charge itself up in one of two ways — either by firing a beam of charged particles into space, or simply by allowing a radioactive isotope to emit charged particles. The charged satellite would then be gently pushed by Earth’s rotating magnetic field, enabling it to change orbit and even escape to interplanetary space. Early signs suggest the idea may work — via Warren Ellis
Office workers glued to their computer screens have an increased risk of potentially fatal blood clots, a world-leading New Zealand study has found. The study, by Professor Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute in Wellington found that 34 per cent of patients admitted to hospital with blood clots had been seated at work for long periods
Scientists are developing an artificial vein for use in patients with circulation problems. The device, which encourages blood to flow in its natural spiralling fashion, has produced highly promising results in clinical trials. The developers hope it will offer surgeons carrying out bypass operations an alternative to relying on blood vessels taken from the patient’s body. It is hoped it could be made available to patients within a year
The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite. The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and friendly
forces across the globe. It’s not yet the Skynet of Terminator, but how long before it becomes self aware?
Viacom says it will sue Google and YouTube for US$1 billion. Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, says YouTube uses its shows illegally. Viacom alleges that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes have been loaded onto YouTube’s site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Google says it is confident
that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders
Every year, Neil Engelman carefully collects his data, stands before his company’s board of directors and is asked the same question: What caused more outages? The lightning or the squirrels? Four of the past five years, the answer has been the squirrels, says Engelman, vice president of operations for the Lincoln Electric System in Nebraska. Nebraska is not alone. Many states are grappling with a big increase in the number of power outages caused by squirrel electrocutions. Squirrels that fry themselves on power lines and transformers cause tens of thousands of blackouts every year
Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users’ Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails. According to postings on Microsoft’s OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files — the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users’ messages and other details are kept — have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted
The European Union’s consumer chief has hit out at Apple’s bundling of its iPod music players and its iTunes online music store
Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn’t work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. They have successfully activated CO2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride
Mayan priests will purify a sacred Guatemalan archaeological site to eliminate bad spirits
after President Bush visits next week — via The Pagan Prattle
Sweden’s government has presented a bill to give its defence intelligence agency powers to monitor any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country. The National Defence Radio Establishment currently listens in on military communications and needs a court order for any other surveillance. The government says conversations within Sweden would remain untouched
Australian researchers say they have found a previously undiscovered species of taipan. The young snake has been found in the central deserts of Western Australia as part of a biodiversity survey. It was initially thought to be a brown snake, but Professor Steve Donellan from the South Australian Museum says DNA testing revealed it to be an unknown species of taipan. He says there are only two other known species of taipan in Australia, and the last one was found 125 years ago
Scientists from the Northern Territory Menzies School of Health Research say they have discovered an effective treatment for the strain of malaria found in the Asia-Pacific region. The treatment combines a Chinese herbal extract and a longer-acting anti-malarial drug used to combat the more deadly strain of the disease found in Africa
Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back — by driving a three-foot stake through his heart — via The Pagan Prattle
A new DNA test will help police in the UK solve rape cases even when the attacker has not left any traces of sperm. The test looks for the genetic hallmark of other cells present in semen, such as skin and immune cells. Its developers at Birmingham’s Forensic Science Service say the test will help provide DNA evidence in a further 90 sexual assault cases a year
Launched in 2001, A123 leveraged research initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to commercially develop lithium-ion batteries that incorporate nanotechnology in the electrodes. The result is a new generation of batteries that deliver up to 10 times longer cycle life, five times more power and dramatically faster charge times over conventional high-power battery technology
Apple may sell zippy notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard-disk drives, according Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research. A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers
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