France: military coordinates flu fight

In addition to plans for countering industrial espionage, terrorism and cyberwar, the Ministry of Defense is also working on plans for combating the flu pandemic

When you enter the Hôpital Foch in Suresnes near Paris (Hauts-de-Seine), the first thing you notice are the coarse orange posters with which the Ministry of Health wants to inoculate the population with behavioral measures to prevent the new A/H1N1 flu. Those who want to escape the disease should wash their hands regularly, use a handkerchief to sneeze, and call the doctor when they notice the first signs of infection.

At the hospital, two members of the medical staff had been infected with the H1N1 virus at the end of July. Twenty patients at risk of infection were placed in quarantines and treated with the antiviral drug Tamiflu. In addition, a crisis team was established, which called the senior staff together every day at 3 p.m. for a situation briefing. All employees of the affected pulmonary department had to wear masks. Those who showed flu symptoms were immediately examined and isolated at home. After 11 days, the safety inspections were lifted again.

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Questions of knowledge and conscience of the professional civil service

Ies of knowledge and conscience of the professional civil service

The rhetoric of leading state security officials reveals disturbing parallels in the state’s counterterrorism efforts

The open border between the knowledge and the not-knowing has always fascinated the poets and thinkers. Philosopher Plato saw himself climbing in a cave, poet Goethe discovered a pact with the devil, physicist Heisenberg struggled with the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Who would have thought that this interesting terrain would be occupied by modern administration?

Internal security officials are sometimes confronted with difficult intellectual challenges. Thereby they often have to deal with Faustian questions. In the following, three exemplary performances by so-called security officials are presented, which, when examined closely, reveal how fragile the situation is in this democracy. Every time it is about the problem of the right way of dealing with "Known knowledge", as one of the gentlemen briefly called it.

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Russia and china have heated the ionosphere with radio waves

Russia and china have heated the ionosphere with radio waves

Antennas of the American HAARP facility for ionospheric research. Image: DoD

The experiments are probably for military purposes; China is building a high-frequency facility like the American HAARP on the South China Sea

The American HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) in Alaska has always aroused suspicion. The once military, now civilian shortwave facility, with 180 transmitters and a power of 5.1 gigawatts, is used to explore how radio waves can be used to reach the ionosphere, d.h. which can study and influence electrons and ions from 60 km above the Earth’s surface. It has been suspected that HAARP, which has been operated by the University of Alaska since 2014, can be used to manipulate the weather or even people’s brains. There are numerous conspiracy theories about this. The ionosphere is of military interest because radio waves are reflected there.

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Erdogan’s path to an islamic turkey…

Erdogan's path to an Islamic turkey...

Fatih Mosque, Bremen. Image: HanFSolo/CC BY-SA 3.0

…and the Islamization of Muslims in Germany. The influence of the Turkish government on the Muslim communities in this country

The introduction of a prasidial system under the rule of Turkey’s autocratic President Erdogan is imminent. With the removal of Prime Minister Davutoglu, the way is open for a dictatorship à la Erdogan. This will lead to the downfall of a once prosperous state on its way to modernity.

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Spinach or worse: veganism as a cresting

About the disappearance of the flour dishes

For a good week, a choice program of the Grunen Spates has been creating a view: the demand that public canteens as "Pioneer" on Thursdays only "Vegetarian or vegan" To offer food. On this proposal, it is down that you do not traditionally meat-free Friday as "Veggie Day" choice. Or Wednesday, the strictly belonging Catholics also considered fasting.

The official fundamentation for that the party remains guilty. A possible explanation of goods that the burgers do not want to draw very attention to the similarities to the Catholic Church, which in their dominion the meat banned on Friday long consistently asserted. That has only been changed since the 1960s. By the table, the ban is not yet: Credit Catholics are still stopped to give up something for this weekdays, which causes them pleasure.

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Oecd expects more than one million asylum seekers in europe this year

More than 800.000 will apply for asylum in Germany, 40 percent could expect recognition

According to an OECD report, more than a million people will apply for asylum by the end of 2015, in Germany alone 800.000. 350.000-450.000 can expect to receive a permit – and with it a permanent right of residence. Last year 630.000 people applied for asylum, as many as in 1992. By the end of August 2015, Frontex had deployed more than half a million "illegal" Refugees paid, in 2014 it was still 280.000. 330.000 refugees arrived via the Mediterranean Sea.

The OECD points out that the inclusion of such coarse quantities poses many problems and will be expensive. In the long term, the goal is to integrate refugees into societies. This is not only a burde, but could also cost "a significant gain for the development of societies" be possible if sufficient support is provided for integration and job creation.

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After the boom is before the crash

After the boom is before the crash

Picture: Pikrepo.com

From New York to Frankfurt: Stock prices are already plummeting again

When, as in these days, the stock exchange rates collapse, it is time for "Legendary investors", to enter the scene. Their task is to make sense of the often irrational price movements on the markets. The words of the gurus are listened to with rough devotion by the financial community. They act as projection surfaces for the desires and fears of the stock market public.

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Recipe for life

Two American scientists believe that complex life arises from a subtle, rarely encountered interplay of many factors

It is one of the most crude, unanswered questions: Are we alone in space?? Are humans the only intelligent life form in the universe? Peter D. Ward does not believe it. "The universe and even our Milky Way are so vast that there must be other intelligent life forms", says the geoscientist from the University of Washington in Seattle. "I think it is impossible that we are alone."

Ward was all the more puzzled when he read the blurb of the book he co-authored with astronomer Donald Brownlee of the same university. "Maybe we are really alone", it said – a phrase that earned the publisher’s editor an angry phone call from Ward. "We were very careful to avoid exactly this statement", he explains. "We don’t think we’re alone."

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Leave the internet effectively controlled by authoritar states?

A report on the control of the Internet in China and Cuba wants to refute the faith that the Internet has a democratizing and subversive effect, but is simplified in a comparative manner

Media and telecommunications are supposed to break up the clip of author’s regimes and counter their censorship. You have seen this when collaping the Eastern Block. Media should not only beat punches into the walls, so the view of the "Feigned" could go to the tempting good and leisure and leisure world, but also through snowball effects the freedom movements in their own land. Many see on the Internet, not ultimately tensioned medium of freedom of expression and the free flow of information that breaks up dominant structures in countries that want to wear behind walls. Wrong, at least in the medium term, means a report provocative, which examines the relevance in China and Cuba. But what does he want to tell us ultimately?

Really smart one gets out of the working paper "The Internet and State Control in Authoritarian regimes: China, Cuba and the Counterrevolution" The journalist Shanti Kalathil and Taylor Boas, employees of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which the study has also published. Pretty banal is the thesis that you do not know Know, how the Internet affects the policy in the long term, but that it does not openly closed companies with enrolled human rights and lack of freedom of expression. But who has said this so? The authentic states try either to reduce the use of the Internet possible, as the unpleasant re-posted the internet ban in Afghanistan, or to control it. Sure you do that, but the interesting question is, with what success? And can now be found after the internet has found in the most autoritar governed states at best for a few years long? Is the internet not only for authoritar systems, but for each system dangerous? In any case, not only commodities of democracy and freedom of expression, but also the enemies of democracy or criminals can be organized.

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Do navigation systems make maps superfluous?

Practical comparison of portable navigation systems

On the one hand, navigation systems are still considered as a prosthesis for people who are too blind to read maps. On the other hand, almost everyone wants one now. Have they really become practical or will the purchase be followed by an exchange?? This depends a bit on the character of the driver and the device – in general, a navigation system increases road safety, but it can also sometimes lead to the opposite.

The best navigation system is an attentive passenger who not only looks up a map, but also pays attention to road signs and tells the driver how to drive. Unfortunately, these co-drivers are rare – women supposedly can’t read maps anyway and men are not much better in this discipline and rather tell the driver what a great blonde has just passed and only afterwards which exit has passed by in the meantime.

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