What Caught My Eye Today

Economy - Suffice it to say that the news is mostly bad. Though this next story makes you chuckle a bit, if for no other reason, that the absurdity of the revelation revealed by the the British Prime Minister. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged for the first time that the world economic downturn is likely to cause a recession in the United Kingdom. Brown told lawmakers at his weekly question-and-answer session at the House of Commons that current economic woes were "likely to cause recession." Now, now, Gordo...let's not go around scaring everyone with a bunch of hastily made conjecture. "Likely to cause recession?" Duh, you pinhead.

Not willing to be outdone by any head of state in the lame ass quote department, we have this gem courtesy of the United Nations.

China - China can boost public trust badly shaken by a spate of food safety scandals, including tainted formula that gave thousands of babies painful kidney stones, by enacting stricter laws and replacing its patchwork surveillance system, according to the U.N. "The national system needs urgent review and revision," the U.N. said. That's a rather provocative statement by the usually tame United Nations. So what if 4 babies have died and another 54,000 have fallen sick. That's no reason to blast an entire country, is it? In the dairy scandal, contamination has also turned up in powered and liquid milk, yogurt and other products made with milk. Dozens of countries have pulled Chinese-made goods with dairy ingredients off their shelves to test for melamine. The United Nations report said China has a basic food hygiene law but it needs revision to cover the food chain from farm to table. Well there's a novel idea. Ensuring that the food chain remains free of harmful chemicals. Who would have thought?

Japan - This particular item caught my attention because it's a bonehead military story that doesn't involve the U.S. military. A Japanese sailor dropping out of an elite navy training program died in an unofficial farewell ritual requiring him to fight 15 classmates. The sailor was two days away from leaving the two-year program for the navy's elite Special Boarding Unit. According to the incident report, one of the school's two supervisors approved the fight, which was suggested by another student. Mind you that not one, but two officers sanctioned this beating...I mean fight. The report, however, stopped short of calling the ritual an act of hazing. No need to jump to conclusions. According to the report, the sailor was unable to kick after several of the 50-second-long rounds and by the tenth round, he was worn out but still responsive. What a wimp. In the 14th round, one of his opponents landed a right hook that knocked him out and he was rushed to the hospital. He never regained consciousness. The report found classmates had differing views of the farewell ritual with one classmate calling it "a nice send-off gift," while another said the victim might have seen the event as a punishment. I am the first to admit that this is an extreme example of military whack jobs going way off the reservation; the vast majority of military personnel conduct themselves with a dignity and honor that most of us can only dream of attaining. The thing that gets me about this particular story is that a stunt like this tends to dominate the headlines and push to the background all the decent acts of the military.

Bad Memories - This medical breakthrough is rather amazing, though the implications of it are rather scary. Amping up a chemical in the mouse brain and then triggering the animal's recall can cause erasure of those, and only those, specific memories. While the study was done in mice that were genetically modified to react to the chemical, the results suggest that it might one day be possible to develop a drug for eliminating specific, long-term memories, something that could be a boon for those suffering from debilitating phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder. Sign me up for a dose to erase the mid-80s (puberty was a bitch) and most of the past year (this financial crisis was just too much for me to handle). For more than two decades, researchers have been studying the chemical--a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II--for its role in learning and memory consolidation. The study found that when the mice recalled long-term memories while the protein was over expressed in their brains, the combination appeared to selectively delete those memories. So this sounds pretty cool, but if this stuff could work to delete bad memories, what's to stop some unscrupulous individual for using it to delete other memories or all of them. To me, this is yet another example of 'just because you can doesn't mean you should.'