An Indian doctor suspected of being behind an illegal kidney transplant racket was arrested in Nepal today and paraded before journalists in the Himalayan country’s capital, Kathmandu.

Amit Kumar is accused of running a private hospital, just outside Delhi, which allegedly lured or forced hundreds of poor people into giving up their kidneys and made millions by selling their organs…

Hotel staff said Kumar kept a low profile, wearing a hat and sunglasses, but he aroused suspicions by cutting out stories about the kidney scam from local newspapers…

Investigators said that, despite his public protestations of innocence, Kumar confessed to carrying out hundreds of kidney transplants in India, where a commercial trade in such organs is illegal.

Busted for currency violations in Nepal, the good doctor had a quarter-million dollars walking-around money with him.

I hope India has laws against profiting from crimes after the fact. There will be movies made about this medical urban legend.

DeCODE scientists have established a substantial and consistent positive correlation between the kinship of couples and the number of children and grandchildren they have. The study, which analyzes more than 200 years of deCODE’s comprehensive define genealogical data on the population of Iceland, shows that couples related at the level of third cousins have the greatest number of offspring.

The findings hold for every 25-year interval studied, beginning with those born in the year 1800 up to the present day…

Perhaps most importantly, these new findings also suggest that the recent and dramatic demographic shift experienced in Iceland — from a rural society to a highly urbanized one — may serve to slow population growth, as individuals are exposed to a much broader range of distantly related potential mates.

If so, this could be of relevance to slowing population growth in the many other — and much more populous – societies around the world undergoing transition from closely-knit rural societies to more urbanized ones. Indeed, the UN estimates that in the 2007-2008 period the majority of the world’s population will, for the first time in human history, live in town and cities.

Interesting stuff. Comments from peers suggest that further elements of culture and economy may still be at play.

Glen or Glenda?

HIGHLANDS RANCH – The issue of being transgender usually pops up with students in high school. However, a 3rd grade boy wants to dress as a girl and wants teachers and students to address him with a girl’s name. “As a public school system, our calling is to educate all kids no matter where they come from, what their background is, beliefs, values, it doesn’t matter,” said Whei Wong, Douglas County Schools spokesperson.

Wong says the staff at one of Douglas County’s schools is preparing to accommodate the student and answer questions other students might have. “I see this as being a very difficult situation to explain to my daughter to explain why someone would not want to be the gender they were born with,” said Dave M. The student had attended this same school in years prior, but had left to go to classes in another district for about two years. The transgender student will be returning to what is the child’s home school. Dave M. thinks classmates will recognize the change. Wong says teachers are planning to address the student by name instead of using he or she. The child will not use the regular boys or girls bathroom. Instead, two unisex bathrooms in the building will be made available. The school is handing out packets to parents who have questions. The packets contain information about people who are transgender. Pearson says children as young as 5 years old are realizing their true gender identity and her group wants to help parents who may be resisting the acceptance of this.

The fact that the schools will be building unisex bathrooms is a stupid idea and will just make matters worse for the kid. This is a tough call and I see no easy answers. I wonder how this is handled in the more “enlightened” parts of the world? After all, this is Colorado.

Teenagers in Wood River [Illinois] were suspended from school this week for protesting abstinence-only education, while two local colleges refused condom distribution on campus.

On Monday, eighth-graders Cheyenne Byrd and Victoria Shoemaker came to school wearing tank tops written with “Safe Sex or No Sex” and condom packages pinned to them.

Wood River-East Alton Elementary Superintendent Mark Cappel said the girls were asked to change their shirts, and refused. The girls told him they did not believe the school’s abstinence-only sex education program was enough.

“I explained that they have an avenue to (discuss issues) through character education class meetings held once a month,” Cappel said.

The girls still refused to change their shirts, and thus were suspended for two days for dress code violation and insubordination.

There’s a decent interview with the girls on local TV – including commercials – but, it doesn’t work on all browsers all the time.

The Archbishop of Canterbury drew criticism from across the political spectrum after he backed the introduction of sharia law in Britain and argued that adopting some aspects of it seemed “unavoidable”. Rowan Williams, the most senior figure in the Church of England, said that giving Islamic law official status in the UK would help to achieve social cohesion because some Muslims did not relate to the British legal system.

His comments, in a lecture on civil and religious law given at the Royal Courts of Justice, were swiftly rebutted by the prime minister’s spokesman, who insisted British law would be based on British values and that sharia law would be no justification for acting against national law.

The archbishop’s political correctness hardly deserves a civil response.

Individuals have to resolve differences between their belief systems and national law all the time – no matter where they live. Trying to reverse that relationship is absurd – though no surprise among theocrats.

With low-end, hi-def TVs in the $500 range, does it make any kind of sense to spend a quarter of that again on cables? Yes, I’m feeling a bit smug and superior today for having spent all of $14 some months ago on a generic HDMI cable at Fry’s (had to search for it — not in the video cable isle for obvious profit reasons) which, as the article mentions, works just as well as Monster Cables at more than 10x the price. Say it with me… digital ain’t analog… digital ain’t analog…

Monster Cables, Monster Ripoff: 80% Markups

Ever wonder why gadget store employees push Monster cables like they’re crack? Bitchin’ markups, just like you suspected all along. That’s what we found when a Radio Shack employee sent us his store’s entire inventory list, which included the wholesale and retail price of every item in stock.

Some cables, like the 19ft HDMI-DVI cable, have markups as high as 80%. Retail: $179.99. Wholesale, $99.40, a profit of $80.54. Or consider the 16 ft S-Video cable, which Radio Shack buys for $61.24 and sells for $114.99. We found non-name brand versions of both on Meritline.com for under $20. It’s not just limited to Radio Shack, Best Buy charges the same retail price, and, presumably, gets them for a similar wholesale price.

Here’s the thing: digital cables, by definition, have no signal loss. A cable is either digital or it’s not. As long as its built to HDMI standards, the only difference between a “fancy” digital cable and a no-name one is the price.

The article lists the markups on all the Monster Cables.

Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size – up to eight times their body length – so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.

Unlike animals that travel long distances to breeding grounds under a wide range of conditions, barnacles reproduce by extending impressively long penises to find and fertilize distant mates. (Barnacles are hermaphrodites, so they can mate with male or female neighbours)…

The research suggests that sexual selection – competition with other males, female choice, sexual conflict between males and females – is not required to explain variation in genital form. In barnacles, this variation appears to be driven largely by the hydrodynamic conditions experienced under breaking waves.

“Put another way,” said Christopher Neufeld, “barnacles select mates simply by being able to reach them, not by what they may look like when they get there.”

Har.

Laser equipped shark

Reports that a fifth undersea communications cable in the Middle East has been damaged in less than a week — further compromising Internet access in countries there, and knocking Iran off the grid entirely – are triggering wild conspiracy theories about who’s at fault, from Islamic extremists to the CIA.

But BizTech readers can proceed with global business as planned: the reports aren’t true. So says Stephan Beckert, research director at TeleGeography, who studies these cables for a living. Beckert tells the Business Technology Blog that he hasn’t heard anything about a fifth cable from his sources in the industry and that the newspaper that reported the outage, the Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates, seems to have double counted two of the cables and missed a fourth one entirely.

Beckert also tells us that one of the cut cables wasn’t cut at all – it’s down because of a power outage. And while Iran is experiencing Internet slowdowns just like the rest of the Middle East, it isn’t off line. Beckert says that the most likely explanation is that a fishing boat damaged the cables by catching them in its net or that a ship accidentally cut them with its anchor – these are responsible for 65% and 18% of cable problems respectively. The first two cables were only 400 yards apart, suggesting that they were damaged in the same incident. “It might have been sharks with laser beams on their heads but I’m guessing it’s not,” says Beckert. Viewed this way, it’s two incidents in a week, which is higher than average but not unusual – last year their were 50 damaged cables in the Atlantic alone.

I don’t know much about undersea cable, but I do know a little about commercial fishing. Even if the nets are fishing the bottom for shrimp or lobster etc., I find it unlikely they could snag and break these lines. Dragging an anchor could definitely cause this, but it’s already been reported there were no ships in the area of at least two of the breaks. And yet I could be wrong. So I would like to apply the Dvorak BS Meter to this article, in the appropriate range.

CBS News – February 7, 2008: An American businesswoman was carted off to jail by religious police in Saudi Arabia for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks in Riyadh, the Times of London reported.

The woman, who spent a day behind bars, was strip-searched and forced to sign a false confession before being released, the newspaper said. The Times declined to publish her name at her request.

She sat with a male colleague in the Starbucks’ family area, the only place women are allowed to sit with men.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” she told the Times.

A U.S. official told The Times that it was being treated as “an internal Saudi matter” and refused to comment on her case.

A 21-year-old German man has been convicted of sending a photograph of his penis to an unknown woman via mobile phone, authorities said on Wednesday. “We all had a bit of a laugh when we saw the thing,” said Christian Kropp, presiding judge at the court in the eastern town of Sondershausen.

The woman reported the sender to police after receiving the photo attachment of the man’s genitals, the court said. Officers found evidence he may have sent similar images to other women.

How funny-looking could it have been?

msnbc.com

CASTALIAN SPRINGS, Tenn. – The muddy field was littered with debris after a wave of violent storms: Living room couches, strollers, children’s toys. So when two rescuers came upon a baby, they thought he was a doll.

Then he moved.

“We grabbed hold of his neck (to take a pulse) and he took a breath of air and started crying,” said David Harmon, a firefighter from a nearby county who was combing the field for tornado victims. The boy was found at least 100 yards away from where his family’s house had been, possibly lifted by the storm’s fierce winds, according to witnesses at the scene on Thursday. There was no trace of exactly where the house stood. His mother, who did not survive, was found in the same field.

As the death toll across the region rose by two Thursday to 57 people, the infant was a sign of hope. The 11-month old boy, named Kyson, was surrounded by flattened homes, bricks from a blown-apart post office and snapped trees, a devastating scene similar to so many communities across the South.

The baby’s mother, 24-year-old Kerri Stowell, was one of six people killed in the small community, said Sumner County Sheriff Bob Barker.

Omaha.com Metro

The “Mouth of the South” might be mellowing, at least in terms of his appetite for ranchland in Nebraska. CNN founder Ted Turner, the largest private landowner in Nebraska and the United States and the nation’s largest bison rancher, said Wednesday that he is about done buying new ranches.

He said he would like to reach 2 million acres nationwide before he dies — about 40,000 acres more than he currently owns. In a half-hour interview, Turner answered questions on a broad range of subjects — his political preferences, the profitability of bison, his shrinking fortune and conspiracy theories that he is buying Nebraska land to corral the best chunks of the Ogallala Aquifer.

“I’m almost done. I’ve got enough,” said Turner, who was visiting Omaha for the reopening and renaming of one of his 54 bison restaurants, now called Ted’s Nebraska Grill.

The 69-year-old billionaire, philanthropist and conservationist said he isn’t interested in free-standing ranches anymore, only “reasonably priced” parcels adjacent to his current operations, which include five ranches in Nebraska near Gordon, Oshkosh and Mullen. The ranches cover 425,221 acres, an area larger than Douglas and Sarpy Counties combined.

“You know what 2 million acres is?” Turner asked over a plate of bison miniburgers and transfat-free onion rings. “If my land was all connected, in one long straight line, a mile deep, it would stretch from New York to San Francisco.” Then he joked: “I’ve been thinking about doing some swaps. I’d be able to cut the United States in half and charge people from going from the north to the south.”

Ha-Ha, (he laughs nervously).

A burger and fries may be the quintessential North American meal but it can also be viewed as the perfect example of humanity’s increasingly varied diet, according to researchers who have conducted a unique study of the plants used around the world for food.

In the first-ever study of the “phylogenetic distribution” of the human diet, U of C plant evolutionary ecologist Jana Vamosi…found that humans likely stand alone when it comes to the spectrum of species we consume. Our ability to process food combined with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and international trade systems has also led to food becoming the ultimate product of a globalized society.

“Generally speaking, we eat very broadly from the tree of life,” Vamosi said. “Others have looked at the sheer number of plant species we consume but nobody has ever examined whether the plants we eat are clustered in certain branches. It turns out that they are not.”

As a case study, the scientists analyzed the ingredients of a simple fast food meal – a McDonald’s Big Mac, French fries and a cup of coffee – to illustrate how the average human diet in developed nations is more diverse than ever before. From potatoes that were first domesticated in South America to mustard that was developed in India, onions and wheat that originated in the Middle East and coffee from Ethiopia, they found the meal contained approximately 20 different species and ingredients that originated around the world. This leads to the conclusion that “a Big Mac is an apt symbol of globalization.”.

We are the ultimate omnivores.

The breadth and distribution of animal protein we consume is common knowledge. Turns out plant life doesn’t stand a chance, either.