Following a major quake, Wellingtonians may have a local student to thank for a giardia-free drink of water.

Wadestown School student Jacqui Ormsby won last week's Wellington Regional Science and Technology Fair with her discovery native woods like totara could filter out the stomach illness-causing parasite. "The tree does it naturally. It goes up through the roots and it filters out the bugs and the dirt, while taking it to the branches."

The system the 13-year-old designed used gravity to drive it: a 2L water bottle is connected to a plastic hose fitted with a 15mm piece of bark-stripped wood, held in place by plumber's tape. Jacqui wanted a set-up any household could make in a situation like the aftermath of a major disaster.

"I wanted to focus on emergencies because of all the earthquakes that happen in New Zealand."

The former spy who sued police after his decade of deception was exposed is believed to have been awarded a settlement by his former employers.

Rob Gilchrist sued the police for $550,000 in 2013 alleging he had been hung out to dry by the police after infiltrating activists groups and trade unions.

Gilchrist's double life was finally revealed in December 2008, when his then-girlfriend Rochelle Rees, a Labour Party and animal rights activist found, incriminating emails to police while carrying out work on his computer. She installed spyware on his computer and mobile phone to confirm her suspicions.

It is understood Gilchrist and the police have reached an agreement, though neither party was willing to comment on the resolution of a claim that reached the High Court.

"I'm not in a position to make any comment other than to say I no longer have any outstanding issues surrounding my time working for NZ Police," Gilchrist said, via email.

With 30% of Venzuelans eating two or fewer meals per day, social unrest is mounting rapidly in President Nicolas Maduro's socialist utopia. As WSJ reports, soldiers have now been deployed to stem rampant food smuggling and price speculation, which Maduro blames for triple-digit inflation and scarcity. "Due to the shortage of food... the desperation is enormous," local opposition politician Andres Camejo said, and nowhere is that more evident than the trampling death of an 80-year-old woman outside a state-subsidized supermarket.

By Amanda Froelich

Positive news! Officials of Connecticut announced last Thursday that the state has officially become the first in the nation to provide housing for every one of its chronically homeless veterans.

No doubt national and state officials are celebrating the monumental achievement after having set a goal earlier on to end veteran homelessness by the end of 2015.

The Connecticut Department of Housing, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH), and other nonprofits and volunteers who spent time on the streets identifying homeless veterans played a major role in the state’s coordinated efforts...

Consumer electronics, including computers and mobiles, are leaving a legacy of toxic waste in countries including China and India. Recycling factories across Asia are recovering e-waste exported from around the world, but discharging heavy metals and chemicals into local water supplies in the process.

...

Now a new filtering device, invented by a US teenager, could provide a cheap and easy way to purify water.

The renewable heavy metal filter, designed by 18-year-old Perry Alagappan, removes 99% of heavy metals from water that passes through it. The filter, built from graphene nanotubes, can be rinsed with a vinegar concentrate and reused. The highly concentrated waste can then be evaporated, leaving a deposit of pure metal that can be used in many different applications.

Windows 10 sends a weekly “activity update” on childrens’ internet browsing and computer history to parents, by default and without telling anyone. The feature could be dangerous as well as embarrassing, users have pointed out, allowing parents to watch everything their children do on the computer.

The operating system sends a weekly note that includes a list of websites children have visited, how many hours per day they have spent on the computer, and for how long they have used their favourite apps, according to reports.

The feature appears to be turned on by default for family accounts — not notifying either children or their parents that they are being spied on — and was reported by parents who hadn’t asked for and weren’t aware of activating the feature themselves.

Brought a smile to my face.

A nuclear strike against Afghanistan was on the table in Washington in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, a senior German diplomat told Spiegel magazine.

Michael Steiner, the current German ambassador to India, served as foreign and security policy aide to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

"The papers were written," he said, confirming that the nuclear option was under consideration. "They had really played through all possibilities."

So far this year, there have been only 220 new science and maths apprenticeships created at any level, while engineering and manufacturing apprenticeships make up fewer than one in five of the new jobs.

Many of the roles being offered on the Government’s website appear to be little more than traditional school-leaver jobs in clerical, catering and retail work “rebranded” as apprenticeships. There are now apprenticeships in street cleaning, warehouse labouring and shop work.

This allows employers to pay a new 18-year-old worker just £2.73 an hour compared with the national minimum wage for that age range of £5.13. While employers are obliged to pay those staff for the one day a week they spend in academic training, this is more than made up for by the government grants available for taking on apprentices.

Phil Jones used to show 0.5C Northern Hemisphere cooling from 1940 to 1975.

But he has since erased almost all of that.

This removal of the 1940’s blip was premeditated fraud

From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt

Climate experts say that CO2 controls extreme weather. Just for fun, let’s pretend they are correct.

US major hurricanes peaked below 320 PPM CO2, and have diminished greatly as CO2 has increased. If the climate experts are correct, it is our moral imperative to never let CO2 levels decline again. Does Obama want more major hurricanes?

"This feels like 2008 all over again," as NPR reports the latest Iowa Poll showed Sanders just 7 points behind Hillary Clinton, who leads 37 to 30 percent among likely Democratic caucus-goers. Why 2008? As NPR notes, that's when a heavily favored Clinton stumbled and lost to Barack Obama, then a young senator whose middle name, Hussein, was the same as a dictator the U.S. had just overthrown and whose last name rhymed with America's Public Enemy No. 1. And while the socialist septuagenarian continues to surge, Hillary faces yet another 'issue', as Yahoo Tech reports, 1 million (or one third) of her 'apparent' Twitter followers are fake.

Tens of thousands of people gathered outisde the Japanese parliament building on Sunday to reject plans put forth by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that would see an aggressive expansion of the nation’s armed forces despite a long-standing constitutional mandate for a “defense only” military posture.

THE MI6 spy found dead in a holdall had illegally hacked into secret data on Bill Clinton, The Sun on Sunday can reveal.

Gareth Williams, 31, dug out the guestlist for an event the former American president was going to as a favour for a pal.

The codebreaker — who had breached his security clearance — handed the list to the friend, who was also to be a guest.

MI6 bosses raged over the data breach amid growing tensions with US security services over Mr Williams’s transatlantic work.

Today, just over five years since his body was found inside a padlocked bag, his death remains one of Britain’s most mysterious unsolved cases.

The Sun on Sunday can reveal that voicemail messages Mr Williams left for family and pals were deleted in the days after his death.

Webmaster addition: Boeing says this is a part from the wing of a 777. Only four 777s have crashed, three of them on land. Only MH 370 vanished over the ocean. So this part has to be from that plane.

Rebekah Brooks’s imminent return as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK was described as a “massive two fingers” to the victims of phone-hacking, but also a “gift” to campaigners seeking greater regulation of the press.

A formal announcement that Ms Brooks, who resigned in 2011 amid the phone-hacking scandal but was cleared last year of criminal charges, will retake control of the company that publishes The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times is expected in the next few weeks.

"Almost EVERY federal government agency is now functioning as a rogue entity. Nearly all of them routinely carry out false flag events in order to justify their own existence (and increase their budgets)," he wrote. "In a very real way, U.S. government agencies have become mafia-style cartels carrying out domestic terrorism across America in order to justify their own existence."

A MI6 spy who was discovered dead in a holdall at his apartment in 2010 had hacked into sensitive information about former US President Bill Clinton, it has been claimed. The spy had obtained Clinton’s diary for an event and passed it to a friend. Gareth Williams, 31, hacked into the event’s guest list as it was to be attended by President Clinton, passing it to his friend who was also to be a guest at the party, according to sources speaking on condition of anonymity to the Sun on Sunday.

At the time, the hackers claimed that 90-95% of the accounts on Ashley Madison were male with “thousands” of fake female profiles. It turns out the group were correct but underestimated the figures ever so slightly.

After careful scrutiny of the data in order to verify that 5.5 million female accounts were indeed fake, the information reveals that many accounts were created with a single localhost IP of 127.0.0.1. This was along with thousands of accounts which listed AshleyMadison.com email address as their primary contact point including organized accounts which stated [email protected], [email protected] and so on.

Another piece of information which is certainly revealing conveys the last log in date a user has checked their inbox, this data is logged by the site even if the user only checks it once. It reveals a huge 20,269,675 men checked their messages while only 1492 woman viewed their inbox.

There is currently a petition on the House of Commons website that demands the arrest of Netanyahu should he try to visit the UK in September. This petition is now expected to reach 100,000 signatures within the next few days.

However, notwithstanding the strength of feeling in the UK against Israeli brutality, Cameron has stunned British voters by proposing to ennoble the director of the British Israel lobby that condones the illegal settlements and the brutal killings by the IDF.

This perverse decision would mean, if ratified, that effectively, an agent of the Israeli government in Tel Aviv would be sitting in the House of Lords, in London – in the second chamber of the British Parliament.

That is a position that would be deemed anti-democratic at best and unacceptable to those who require our legislators to hold an unequivocal allegiance exclusively to the democratic institutions of the United Kingdom.

An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition backing pro-government forces in Yemen has killed 31 people in the northern province of Hajjah.

The strikes hit a bottling plant in the province on Sunday morning. Most of the dead were civilians.

The coalition is targeting Shia rebels known as Houthis.

The UN says almost 4,500 people have died since the coalition started its campaign in March and that there is now a humanitarian "catastrophe".

"The process of recovering the bodies is finished now. The corpses... many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant," resident Issa Ahmed told the Reuters new agency from the site of Sunday's strike in Hajjah.

Tens of thousands have rallied outside Japan's parliament to protest against planned new laws that could see troops in the officially pacifist nation engage in combat for the first time since World War II.

A growing number of people, including university students and young parents, have joined a swelling opposition against the controversial bills as prime minister Shinzo Abe's ruling party gears up to pass them before the current session ends late next month.

The human race was not very advanced.............

By Poly Paradyme

The digital world is still reeling over the massive hack and leak surrounding Ashley Madison the adult, “cheating on your spouse” website. There have been heavy consequences for some that used the site.

Reports of extortion for Bitcoin are hitting the web. Homosexuals in foreign countries with anti-gay policies have been outed. We’ve also seen suicides connected to Ashley Madison. Marriages have likely ended this week, families likely broken or dealing with a very strange type of digital drama...

The Blue between Sky and Water, places Susan Abulhawa among the Illustrissimi of Palestinian literature. It is a novel one must read, at minimum twice. Once to follow the ‘what’s next’ of the evolving plot with its larger than fiction characters.

And the second time?

To slowly savour the luminescent beauty of the writing: human life, generically Palestinian, from the minute to the magnificent, is caught in the net of Abulhawa’s lyrical genius and comes up from the depths of her creativity shimmering.

The novel, set in Gaza, spans four generations of the Baraka family's experience of the great Palestinian tragedy of the Naqba, past and present,