Why Anwar chose the Mandela way and made an unsworn statement

Written by N Surendran

On 22nd August 2011, Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim made an unsworn statement from the dock during his second sodomy trial in just over a decade. He chose to do so knowing that less weight would be given to his testimony as compared to sworn testimony from the witness box.

This decision not to testify from the witness box is at once a searing protest against an unjust legal and political system, an eloquent indictment of that system and a powerful call for reform and change.

By refusing to testify and daring them to do their worst, Anwar Ibrahim has put the legal and political establishment itself on trial. Through this single, public act of principled defiance he has demonstrated the shocking extent to which our justice system has been reduced to being a tool of those who are in power now.

Mandela too knew what he would be getting

His act echoes that of Nelson Mandela, who in a bygone era also chose to give an unsworn statement from the dock during his political trial. Mandela used his now famous statement in the Rivonia sham trial to expose the evils of the apartheid regime to the scrutiny of the world.The stirring conclusion to Mandela's speech is quoted by Anwar Ibrahim in his own statement from the dock.

Like Anwar after him, Mandela realised that the only possible verdict was 'guilty' and preferred to make a full and coherent statement of his struggle rather than let his argument emerge in 'bits and pieces' during cross-examination.

The unsworn statement as it is today is the fruit of several hundred years of development of the common law. In England accused persons were not allowed counsel in felonies until 1836 and the practice thus grew up of allowing the accused person to make an unsworn statement from the dock.

Foregone conclusion

When the Criminal Evidence Act 1898 finally allowed sworn evidence to be accepted by the court, the right to make an unsworn statement from the dock was expressly preserved so as not to compel an accused person to go into the witness box. This hallowed and time-marked right is invaluable to the victim of a political trial, fighting against the entire might of the State.

What Nelson Mandela did in 1963, Anwar Ibrahim did yesterday. Used in a righteous cause, the unsworn statement from the dock is a powerful tool against an unjust legal and political establishment.

Anwar Ibrahim has rightly said that the outcome of his sodomy trial is a foregone conclusion. Now he has taken this judicial persecution and turned it into a weapon for the betterment of the nation.

- N Surendran is a prominent human rights lawyer and a vice president of PKR

The Domino Effect of Europe Bank Woes

By: John Carney / Senior Editor, CNBC.com

Concerns over the health of European banks are rattling markets Thursday.

So it’s worth taking a closer look at which dominos are likely to start tumbling.

Investors are still quite spooked about the financial sector. When bad news about banks hits the headlines, there is a knee-jerk tendency to sell shares, redeem funds with exposure to the banks, and seek safe-haven.

Today’s Wall Street Journal story said that officials at the Federal Reserve have been in talks with the heads of European banks with U.S. businesses. This could be taken as a reassuring sign that regulators are proactively attempting to address potential problems. Lots of investors are probably going to take the most conservative view, however, viewing it as a sign of real problems.

This leads to selling, not just European bank shares, but U.S. bank shares. Why? Part of the reason is that we just don’t know how interconnected various financial institutions are with each other. But 2008 taught us that just because we don’t see the connections, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

There’s also the problem with hedge funds trying to hedge exposure to European banks. The short-selling ban on European banks makes hedging exposure more difficult. One response by some hedge funds will be to short U.S. banks as a proxy.

Large depositors are also likely to flee, withdrawing money out of European banks and putting them in U.S. banks. There’s no evidence of anything like a bank run underway, though at the margin, it’s likely the European banks are seeing withdrawals.

Then we have the prime money-market funds . The yield on these funds is so small right now that some smart people on Wall Street wonder why anyone has money in them at all. If you are being paid 0.04 percent for any amount of risk, why not just stick it in a risk-free account, perhaps a money-market fund that owns only Treasury bonds, or just buy Treasury bonds directly.

Yet there still is a lot of money in prime funds. Some of that is likely to be withdrawn by investors concerned about the exposure of the funds to the financial sector. Money-market funds are ordinarily a big source of short-term funding for both U.S. and European banks with dollar obligations. So fears about Europe or the financial sector translate into redemptions at money-market funds.

Imagine for a moment that you are a corporate Treasurer at a company sitting on $100 million. The Wall Street Journal lands on your CFO's desk. Now he wants to know what the company's exposure to Europe is. Do you want to tell him you have tens of millions in funds that may be exposed to Europe, and that those millions are earning you pennies? Not if you want to keep your job.

So you do the rational thing. You redeem out of prime funds. You put the money in the bank. Or in government funds. Or maybe you go buy some Treasury bills.

The good news is that money-market funds have a lot of liquidity right now. The U.S. banking sector is so flush with cash that it doesn’t really need to borrow short term. And the funds have been decreasing their exposure to European banks.

In fact, there’s a bit of circularity to this. Money-market funds concerned about redemptions move to assets with very short durations in order to stay liquid. This drives up the funding costs of European banks, who decide to just run down their reserves at the Fed instead.

The running down of reserves worries investors with money in the prime funds, which leads to redemptions.

Fortunately, this is unlikely to become a death spiral. The liquidity positions of the prime funds are solid. The reserves of the banks are enormous. There’s a lot of room for a credit crunch to run behind the scenes before it actually threatens the health of any but the weakest financial institutions.

Nearly half of children near Fukushima plant absorbed radiation

IWAKI, Fukushima Prefecture--A survey of more than 1,000 children and babies living near the quake-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has produced an alarming finding: 45 percent of them suffered internal exposure to radiation following the accident there.

Most children absorbed relatively low levels of radiation in their thyroid glands, according to officials who explained the results to residents in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, on Aug. 17.

Tests conducted in Iwaki city, Kawamata town and Iitate village between March 24 and 30 found that 26 percent of under-16s absorbed 0.01 microsievert per hour, while 11 percent absorbed 0.02 microsievert per hour. At least one child recorded radiation of 0.10 microsievert per hour, but officials said that level did not pose a health risk.

During a one-on-one consultation session, a woman who had received a letter from the government saying her 14-year-old son had an internal exposure reading of 0.01 microsievert per hour asked the officials whether it was safe for her family to continue living in Iwaki.

An official responded that radiation levels were low in the city, but said she should be careful of grass and roadside ditches.

"The meeting did not answer my questions or eliminate my anxieties at all," she said. She complained that the officials' explanations were no more helpful than what is available on the Internet and other sources of information.

Her son, who also attended the meeting, said: "The figure is not zero because my body has taken in radioactive materials. I would like to be told whether I am OK or not."

Examinations were conducted on about 1,150 children aged 15 or younger, including babies under 1 year old. Data was obtained for 1,080 children.

In 55 percent of cases, no internal exposure was detected.

At the time of the tests, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan said detailed examinations would be required if internal exposure levels reached 0.20 microsievert per hour.

The standard was based on the assumption that residents had inhaled radioactive materials gradually over 12 days from March 12, when an explosion shook the nuclear plant and released radioactive materials a day after the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.

But the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and other organizations have since found that large amounts of radioactive iodine were released over four or five days from March 12.

The finding shows that children's internal organs and tissues may have been exposed to much higher radiation levels during that period than was initially assumed.

Iodine-131, for example has a half-life of around five to seven days, meaning that some children may have been exposed to levels of radiation that would require detailed examination.

Radioactive iodine can develop into cancer if large amounts are accumulated in the thyroid gland, and children are particularly vulnerable. The thyroid gland produces hormones related to metabolism and growth from iodine in the body.

The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan is also not planning to reflect the International Atomic Energy Agency's new stricter standards for taking medications to protect thyroid glands from internal exposure.

The meeting in Iwaki on Aug. 17 was held after residents pressed the government to provide detailed explanations about the survey. Officials had previously said there would be no health problems, but failed to offer figures to back up that statement. About 50 residents attended the meeting in Iwaki.

The Fukushima prefectural government plans to conduct lifelong screening for thyroid gland cancer on about 360,000 children in the prefecture who were 18 or younger on April 1.

The inspections will start as early as October, and initial ultrasound examinations will be carried out by March 2014. These children will undergo ultrasonography once every two years until they turn 20 and once every five years for the rest of their lives.

When lumps and other suspected symptoms are detected, children will receive detailed examinations, including blood tests.

Separate studies of internal exposure started in late June, covering all 2 million residents of Fukushima Prefecture. In preliminary examinations, internal exposure levels were measured using whole-body counters for about 180 residents of Iitate, Kawamata and other areas where high radiation levels were detected.

Initial estimates are that all residents' internal radiation levels over several decades will not exceed 1 millisievert per person, officials say.

Chinese scientists come up with plan to save Earth from asteroid hit

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti)

A group of Chinese scientists have proposed using a solar sail to prevent the possible collision of Apophis, a 46 million ton asteroid, with the Earth in 2036.

The asteroid, which is 270 meters in diameter, will approach Earth at a distance of 37,000-38,000 kilometers in 2029. In 2036 Apophis may come back and collide with Earth on April 13, 2036.

According to scientists, the chance of a collision in 2036 is extremely slim and the asteroid would likely disintegrate into smaller parts and smaller collisions with Earth could occur in the following years.

However, a group of Chinese astronomers headed by Shengping Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing published an article proposing to place a small spacecraft with a solar sail into a retrograde orbit in order to change the asteroid’s trajectory.

The retrograde orbit will give the spacecraft an impact velocity of 90km/s which, if this is done well enough in advance, will prevent Apophis from returning to Earth.

The project may be difficult to realize as all kinds of variations in the solar wind could send the spacecraft wildly off course, according to Technologyreview.com.

The asteroid, discovered in 2004, is considered the largest threat to our planet, although NASA scientists say the likelihood of a hazardous strike on Earth in 2036 is unlikely.

IBM develops first 'brain chips' capable of mimicking the process of human thought

* The chips can adapt to information that they weren't specifically programmed to expect

* They can potentially process real-world signals such as temperature, sound or motion and make sense of them

By Daily Mail Reporter

The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain has tested the limits of science for decades.

But researchers from IBM today said they have made a key step towards combining the two worlds.

The U.S. technology firm has built two prototype chips that it says process data more like how humans digest information than the chips that currently power PCs and supercomputers.

The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year-long project that has involved 100 researchers and some $41million (£25million) in funding from the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). IBM has also committed an undisclosed amount of money.

The prototypes offer further evidence of the growing importance of 'parallel processing', or computers doing multiple tasks simultaneously.

That is important for rendering graphics and crunching large amounts of data.

The uses of the IBM chips so far are prosaic, such as steering a simulated car through a maze, or playing Pong.

It may be a decade or longer before the chips make their way out of the lab and into actual products.

But what is important is not what the chips are doing, but how they are doing it, says Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who worked with IBM on the project.

The chips' ability to adapt to types of information that it wasn't specifically programmed to expect is a key feature.

Professor Tononi said: 'There's a lot of work to do still, but the most important thing is usually the first step and this is not one step, it's a few steps.'

Technologists have long imagined computers that learn like humans. iPhone or Google servers can be programmed to predict certain behaviour based on past events.

But the techniques being explored by IBM and other companies and university research labs around 'cognitive computing' could lead to chips that are better able to adapt to unexpected information.

IBM's interest in the chips lies in their ability to potentially help process real-world signals such as temperature or sound or motion and make sense of them for computers.

The New York state-based firm is a leader in a movement to link physical infrastructure, such as power plants or traffic lights, and information technology, such as servers and software that help regulate their functions.

Such projects can be made more efficient with tools to monitor the myriad analogue signals present in those environments.

Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said the new chips have parts that behave like digital 'neurons' and 'synapses' that make them different than other chips.

Each 'core', or processing engine, has computing, communication and memory functions.

He said: 'You have to throw out virtually everything we know about how these chips are designed.

'The key, key, key difference really is the memory and the processor are very closely brought together. There's a massive, massive amount of parallelism.'

The project is part of the same research that led to IBM's announcement in 2009 that it had simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.

Using progressively bigger supercomputers, IBM had previously simulated 40 per cent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 per cent of a human's cerebral cortex in 2009.

A computer with the power of the human brain is not yet near. But Professor Modha said the latest development is an important step.

'It really changes the perspective from "What if?" to "What now?"' he said.

'Today we proved it was possible. There have been many sceptics, and there will be more, but this completes in a certain sense our first round of innovation.'