Monsanto Co. photo

U.N. food agency promoting
putting insects on the menu


A new study by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says insects could be used in the fight against hunger and to increase food security.

A report released Monday says that forest insects form part of the traditional diet for some two billion people worldwide and are a readily available source of nutritious and protein-rich food.

Some of the most widely consumed insects include beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps and ants. The food agency report says insects are rich in protein, good fats, iron and other minerals.

The report cites the disgust factor as being a large reason as to why eating insects is rare in Western countries, an effect that trickles down to much of the world. It also suggests chefs can help raise the status of insects by incorporating them into recipes and menus.

Insects produce a fraction of emissions such as methane, ammonia and greenhouse gases compared to other animals, according to the food agency.  It adds that on average, insects use just two kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of meat, compared to cattle which require eight kilograms of feed to produce the same amount.

The food agency also pointed out that in addition to food, insect gathering and farming can also offer employment and income generation for people and businesses.


The AP says Justice Department
grabbed reporter phone records


The Associated Press news agency says the U.S. government has seized two months of telephone records for many of its reporters and editors.

The organization's chief executive, Gary Pruitt, called the action a massive and unprecedented intrusion into AP's newsgathering operations.

Pruitt said Monday that The AP learned from the Justice Department Friday that the government agency gathered phone records for more than 20 separate phone lines of AP offices and journalists.

He said the records cover a two-month period in early 2012 and include AP bureaus in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut.

An Associated Press story on the matter says the government has not given any explanation why the phone records were seized.

However, the story notes that U.S. officials have previously said the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information for an AP story in May 2012 about a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaida bomb plot.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington said in a statement Monday that it is "always careful and deliberative" when dealing with issues of the press. It did not specifically mention The Associated Press case.


NATO chief cites cyber threat
as priority for modern society


The departing top NATO military commander has listed cyber security as the number one challenge for the coming years.

Cyber attacks on corporations and governments are no longer unusual. Suspects and their computers are hauled away on a regular basis. 

That's why Admiral James Stavridis said he sees cyber security as the top challenge for his successor. he said, "Our society is so dependent on all these cyber capabilities, and yet our level of preparation is very low, particularly as an alliance.”

It’s also relatively easy. Anyone with decent computer skills can do it.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization  does have a command center for cyber defense and a cyber research center in Estonia.  But Admiral Stavridis said, even within the alliance, international cooperation on cyber defense is limited.

“This is, of course, an area in which nations are extremely sensitive and are very concerned about showing what they know to each other," he said. "But we’ve got to get over that because the threat is very high and very real.”

Cyber attacks can range from nuisance attacks to strikes at computers that control banks or air traffic. There have been thefts of government intelligence and corporate secrets. And cyber attacks can have physical consequences, like disabling power plants. Last week, U.S. officials said a cyber attack helped a gang steal $45 million from cash machines around the world.

At London’s City University, Professor Kevin Jones heads the department of computer sciences. He said the Internet makes it possible for anyone to be a terrorist.

“That’s sort of terrorism at a much more approachable level than individuals carrying explosive devices because people are doing it from the security of their own bedrooms,” he said.

Many countries are developing offensive cyber weapons, and some, including China, Israel and the United States have been accused of using them.

“I think it’s too soon to bring that into the alliance," the admiral said. "But that’s an area that I think individual nations are going to be looking at. And, over time, what’s needed here is the intellectual capital that evolves a theory of deterrence in the world of cyber.”

Deterrence could be achieved through threats of cyber or conventional attacks. Professor Jones thinks it just might work.

“You could imagine setting up a situation where it’s deemed far too risky to make an attack on country X’s stock exchange because you know the consequences are your systems will then be attacked and closed down in a certain way,” he said.

But an individual with a grievance might not care whether his or her country suffers a counterattack, adding another dangerous dimension to the issue Admiral Stavridis already has at the top of his list.


Newseum adds 82 names
to wall of dead journalists


The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and also protects freedom of the press. But in many countries, journalists are not allowed to report the news or criticize their governments, and are punished or even killed for doing so. And in war zones, journalists are frequently exposed to crossfire. The dangers to journalists are evident in the number of those killed in the line of duty.

They were killed last year while doing their jobs. The Newseum in Washington has added 82 names to its Journalists Memorial.

Photojournalist Ahmed Ismael Hassan al-Samadi was shot in Bahrain while taping an anti-government protest.

His father Ismail carries the camera his son was using when he was killed. No one has been charged in his death.

"What I hope is that every martyr gets justice -- everyone who died this year and previous years. And I hope that justice takes its course," Ismael said.

Voice of America radio reporter Mukarram Khan Aatif was killed by gunmen while saying prayers at a Pakistani mosque.

Aatif joins more than 2,200 journalists on this wall — all killed while practicing their craft — often in countries that do not have freedom of the press, or are plagued by war. Syria was the deadliest country for journalists last year, with 29 deaths.

NBC correspondent Richard Engel knows the danger. He and his crew were kidnapped last year in Syria then rescued after five days.

"You have pockets of the country that are run by one group, pockets of the same country that are run by yet another group, the capital that is still in the government's hands and how you navigate from one political space to the next where you don't really know who to trust, who has capacity to give you safe passage. I fear next year Syria is going to be very represented on this list as well," Engel said.

The second most dangerous country last year was Somalia with 12 deaths, followed by Brazil and Pakistan. Those journalists join the others on the memorial, dating back to 1837.

Richard Engel says these journalists died doing what they loved. Not behind a desk, but with their boots on and pencil in hand.


April retail sales were up
slightly, government says


U.S. retail sales rose in April, as households bought cars, building materials and other goods. 

Monday's report from the Commerce Department said consumer spending rose one-tenth of a percent from the previous month.

Outside the volatile areas, like fuel and cars, spending in the overall economy jumped five-tenths of a percent.

Economists and investors track retail sales closely because consumer demand drives about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity.

The report surprised many economists who had predicted that retail sales would decline as the effect of tax increases and government spending cuts worked their way through the economy.


Obama citing improvements
in the U.S. housing market


U.S. President Barack Obama says the U.S. housing market is healing, seven years after the real estate bubble burst, but he adds there is still more work to do to help homeowners save money and stay in their homes.
 
Obama said in his weekly address Saturday that home sales are up and foreclosures are down, construction is expanding, and 1.7 million families are no longer behind on their mortgages. He said his housing plan has helped more than two million people refinance their mortgages and save an average of $3,000 a year.
 
But he said there are other U.S. homeowners who have not been allowed to refinance, or have done everything right but still owe more on their homes than their homes are worth. Obama called on Congress to support the effort to give all homeowners a chance to refinance.
 
He also called on members of Congress to support his nominee, North Carolina lawmaker Mel Watt, to take over leadership of the U.S. Federal Housing Agency.


European banking union
remains uncertain, elusive


Spain and Portugal called Monday for the eurozone to complete a banking union as Germany underscored legal hurdles before a central element of the plan to deal with failing banks can be introduced.
 
“It is indispensable that we stick to the agreed calendar on banking union and that we take steps to make sure families and small companies receive credit,” Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told reporters.
 
“Banking union is the credibility test of the European Union,” he said, after meeting Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, who backed his calls for progress on Europe's most ambitious reform of the financial crisis.
 
The call came as finance ministers from the eurozone met in Brussels, ahead of which German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble reiterated the need for a change to EU treaties to underpin the new system of bank resolution.

“When a bank is wound up, money and jobs are usually lost. Those affected will seek redress. If there is an activity that needs a solid legal base, it is resolution,” he wrote in an article in the Financial Times Monday.
 
To avoid treaty change and have a banking union “of sorts” Schaeuble proposed to stick for now to the intermediate stage of a coordinated network of national resolution authorities, rather than a new EU resolution authority.
 
“This would be a timber-framed, not a steel-framed, banking union,” Schaeuble wrote.
 
Most eurozone countries and institutions believe a full banking union, which would help deal with banking crises, is needed urgently to restore investor confidence.
 
Under the plan, the biggest banks will be supervised by the European Central Bank from the middle of next year. There is also to be a single bank resolution mechanism that would wind down insolvent banks. Plans for a common deposit guarantee scheme are unlikely to happen any time soon.
 
But while the bank supervision looks set to take effect as planned, the single authority that would order and finance the closure of a bank is unlikely to materialize soon, because Germany believes it needs a change to the EU treaty.
 
Some were sympathetic to this message.

"Many of the building blocks for the banking union can be put in place. The issue of the treaty change can be addressed later on,'' Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Eurogroup chairman, told reporters before the ministerial meeting.
 
“I think the Germans are putting forward understandable questions, which will have to be dealt with. But I don't see why that should stop us making progress on banking union,” he said.
 
But the issue is divisive because a change to the European Union treaty could take years and entails risks — the revised law could be rejected in one of the 27 national EU parliaments during ratification.
 
Some policy-makers believe Germany is demanding treaty change to push the discussion on bank resolution back until after its parliamentary elections in September, in which Chancellor Angela Merkel will have to deal with rising popular discontent with bailing out eurozone banks and governments.
 
“You do not need treaty change for banking resolution, it can be done under the existing rules,” one EU diplomat said. “Germany is erecting barriers to slow down the process, but that is a political decision, not a technical one.”


New report says the world
is falling short on sanitation   


By 2015, almost one-third of the global population will remain without access to improved sanitation - which is U.N.-speak for hygienic toilet facilities. That would fall well short of a key global Millennium Development Goal, which is detailed in a new report published jointly by the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children’s Fund.
 
Bruce Gordon, the acting coordinator for water, sanitation and health at the World Health Organization, said Monday’s report was published as a wake-up call.

“Now, with the period of the MDGs coming to a close — I think it is in about 1,000 days or so — we are seeing very clearly that unless we do something very differently, the sanitation goal is going to be missed.”

The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goal number 7, aims to reduce by half by 2015 the number of people without access to clean, reliable toilet facilities compared to numbers reported in 1990.
 
According to the report, if the current trend persists, 2.4 billion people will still be living without improved sanitation. They say the goal will be missed by 8 percent.
 
Gordon said a major drive needs to be made to get the numbers on track.
 
One of the key efforts, he said, needs to be made in rural areas. Gordon noted that a lot of money is spent on complex urban sanitation systems in cities, at the expense of those in rural areas who have nothing.

The World Bank estimates global economic losses due to poor sanitation at $260 billion a year.


Human brain still recognizes
bad grammar when distracted


The brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.

Participants in the study — native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 — had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the event-related potential. This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as "We drank Lisa's brandy by the fire in the lobby," or "We drank Lisa's by brandy the fire in the lobby." A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. "Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high," she said. "The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn't."

When tones appeared after grammatical errors, subjects detected 89 percent of the errors. In cases where subjects correctly declared errors in sentences, the researchers found a response in which the error is recognized and corrected on the fly to make sense of the sentence.

When the tones appear before the grammatical errors, subjects detected only 51 percent of them. The tone before the event, said co-author Helen J. Neville, a psychology professor, created a blink in their attention. The key to conscious awareness, she said, is based on whether or not a person can declare an error, and the tones disrupted participants' ability to declare the errors. But, even when the participants did not notice these errors, their brains responded to them, generating an early negative event-related potential response. These undetected errors also delayed participants' reaction times to the tones.

"Even when you don't pick up on a syntactic error your brain is still picking up on it," Ms. Batterink said. "There is a brain mechanism recognizing it and reacting to it, processing it unconsciously so you understand it properly."

The study was published in the May 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. "While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language."

It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Ms. Neville, a member of the university's Institute of Neuroscience.

Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to "Jabberwocky," the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in "Through the Looking Glass," where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.

For a second language, she said, "Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does."


Psychologist and media figure
Joyce Brothers dies at 85


American psychologist and pop-culture figure Joyce Brothers, 85, who parlayed her 1950s game show celebrity into a six-decade media career, died Monday.

Her long-time publicist said she died outside New York City of natural causes.

Ms. Brothers, who once taught at Columbia University, first gained fame on the 1950s game show "The $64,000 Question" for her encyclopedic knowledge of boxing.

She became the only woman to win the show's top prize, and by 1958 NBC television had signed her as a program host who dispensed advice on love, marriage, sex and child-bearing.

Ms. Brothers also boosted her celebrity as an author and magazine columnist, and wrote a syndicated advice column that appeared in more than 350 newspapers. She also appeared in film roles portraying her professional self in more than a dozen Hollywood movies.