Eideard

“I can’t find the right words to describe when you are homeless,” says Iraq war veteran Joseph Jacobo. “You see the end of your life right there. What am I going to do, what am I going to eat?”

Jacobo is one of an increasing number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who come home to life on the street. The Department of Veterans Affairs is fighting to find them homes.

Veterans make up almost a quarter of the homeless population in the United States. The government says there are as many as 200,000 homeless veterans; the majority served in the Vietnam War. Some served in Korea or even World War II. About 2,000 served in Iraq or Afghanistan…

As strongly as I have fought against our nation’s imperial wars, I resent in equal proportion the sleazy treatment afforded veterans of those conflicts.

Politicians who deny our veterans unemployment compensation, education opportunities, the panoply of cheapskate fiscal hypocrisy – are only worthy of contempt.

There are no signs to announce the edge of the solar system, but when the venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft approached this final frontier last Aug. 31 it was in for quite a shock. So were the scientists who analyzed the data that the craft radioed back to Earth, along with related observations by NASA’s twin Earth-orbiting STEREO spacecraft.

The signals reveal that at a distance of 83.7 astronomical units (1 AU is the average Earth-sun separation), Voyager 2 had at least five encounters with a turbulent region known as the termination shock. That’s the place where the solar wind — the sun’s hot supersonic wind of protons and other charged particles, which carves the heliosphere, a bubble in space extending well beyond the orbit of Pluto — slams into cold interstellar space and abruptly slows…
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are asking a federal court to order the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over records about the agency’s tracking of mobile phone users.

The two civil liberties groups have filed a lawsuit…saying U.S. residents should have a right to know the extent of mobile phone tracking done by U.S. attorneys offices.

In the past year and a half, multiple news reports and court cases have revealed that some U.S. attorneys were claiming not to need probable cause of a crime in order to track people using mobile phones, the groups say in their complaint. In some cases, U.S. attorneys have bypassed court-ordered warrants, with law enforcement agents obtaining “tracking data directly from mobile carriers without any court involvement,” the complaint says…

The ACLU filed a request for information on the tracking program, under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, in November, but the DOJ has not yet delivered the documents requested.

Of course, if you have complete trust in your government, you needn’t worry. Right?

I – on the other hand – trust my government as far as I can throw them uphill into a heavy wind – underhand!

Sweden may be better known for cars and couches than computers, but when it comes to access to broadband and cellular networks, it’s tops. The Scandinavian country leads the world in “technological readiness,” according to the World Economic Forum…

Nordic countries in general did well this year, with Iceland finishing second and Denmark fifth. Like Sweden, they benefit from government support of technology and a strong focus on education and innovation. Education is both a precondition and an enabler for leveraging technology, notes Irene Mia. Both countries improved their showing this year – Iceland climbing from No. 4, Denmark from No. 10…

Two Asian countries made the top 10: Hong Kong at No. 6 and South Korea at No. 7. In contrast to Switzerland, the Korean government champions information and communication technologies (ICT) and has heavily subsidized broadband construction, notes the WEF. Hong Kong’s rank – its highest ever – reflects its increasingly wired citizenry and government. It got a further boost from its business-friendly policies.

Near the bottom: the United States, which scored well in ICT usage, but rated poorly on regulatory issues. After dominating the tech index for years, the U.S. dropped to No. 5 in 2006, No. 8 in 2007 and is currently No. 9.

Unlike the usual list of this type – constructed over coffee by an editor and three bored writers who need to fill white space – this annual effort is grounded in quantifiable parameters.

How much reality varies according to various estimates of the importance of “doing business” on a global scale. It’s a reasonable reflection of the state of communications in an information-dependent economy.

A New Zealand man has put his soul up for auction to the highest bidder, noting that is “a merry old soul” rather than a “funk soul brother” but that he would “would like to think there is a bit of funk in there somewhere.”

The auction closes at 12:00 p.m. Thursday local time (0000 Thursday GMT), and bids so far had reached US$189.

Advice from a lawyer was that the winning bidder would not be entitled to anything but Scott’s soul and would not be able to own or control him in any way, he said.

This might be a new and productive approach for those chartered with halting the decline in superstition in the educated world. Religions could simply buy up souls to list on their membership rolls.

A 49-year-old woman collapsed and died on the floor of a waiting room at a Brooklyn psychiatric hospital and lay there for more than an hour as employees ignored her, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident…

Upon her admission, Esmin Green waited nearly 24 hours for treatment…

The surveillance camera video shows the woman rolling off a waiting room chair, landing face-down on the floor and convulsing. Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, the organization said, workers at the hospital ignored her.

At 6:35 a.m., the tape shows a hospital employee approaching and nudging Green with her foot, the group said. Help was summoned three minutes later…

“Contrary to what was recorded from four different angles by the hospital’s video cameras, the patient’s medical records say that at 6 a.m., she got up and went to the bathroom, and at 6:20 a.m. she was ’sitting quietly in waiting room’ — more than 10 minutes since she last moved and 48 minutes after she fell to the floor.”

Our government cut Medicare benefits, this week. Just in case you were worried about health care in the United States becoming too caring.

This hospital is obviously up to American standards. Ask them. They’ll tell you so.

Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere, is the happiest country in the world, say researchers.

Zimbabwe, torn by political and social strife, is the least happy, while the world’s richest nation, the United States, ranks 16th.

Overall, the world is getting happier, according to the U.S. government-funded World Values Survey, done regularly by a global network of social scientists.

It found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analyzed.

“I strongly suspect that there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness,” said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, who directed the study.

And, said Ingelhart, there is a strong correlation between happiness and democracy.

So, why do we have a government working harder than ever at making us unhappy?