Irish company challenges scientists to test 'free energy' technology

An Irish company threw down the gauntlet on Friday to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
http://www.physorg.com/news75115456.html

The company, Steorn (http://www.steorn.net), says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy -- a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.

It claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.

Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland's Nobel prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw who said that "all great truths begin as blasphemies".

Sean McCarthy, Steorn's chief executive officer, said they had issued the challenge for 12 physicists to rigorously test the technology so it can be developed.

"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.

"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.

McCarthy said Steorn had not set out to develop the technology, but "it actually fell out of another project we were working on".

One of the basic principles of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.

McCarthy said a big obstacle to overcome was the disbelief that what they had developed was even possible.

"For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.

"But we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. We have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works.

"But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said.

© 2006 AFP

Thanks be someone writes this careful logic in the Irish Times:
Sharing space and history
Declan Kiberd

In his poem September 1, 1939, WH Auden wrote two fateful lines: "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return".

He was thinking of the humiliation of the Germans after the first World War and how this had assisted the rise of Nazi power. Were he alive now, he might sadly repeat his mantra, as Lebanese civilians become the latest victims of Hitler's own victims.

The Israelis - with massive infusions of US cash and "smart weapons" - have become the smiters of history, after centuries of being the smitten. In that inexorable process, Arab peoples of the Middle East have been cast as the New Jews - pariahs, outcasts, homeless wanderers.

To express solidarity with these victims is in no way to be guilty of anti-Semitism. The real anti-Semites today are those right-wing cartoonists in certain papers who portray the Arab in the traditional role of a Semite, complete with hooked nose, swarthy face and evil "plotting" grin. The transference was made back in the 1960s, after the Six-Day War, but the underlying figure is essentially the same as the Jewish bogeyman who terrified medieval children.

Like the Jews of old, Arabs are most often portrayed as a threat, even though they are far more often the ones threatened. The Palestinians were deprived of a homeland and robbed of their passports after the second World War. Ever since, they have been feared, because people always demonise those whom they have robbed. So deep did those fears run that, in 1982, an invading Israeli army stood nearby while a supporting Falange militia slaughtered 3,500 Palestinian refugees at a camp in Lebanon.

After that awful event, some American Jews withdrew support for the state of Israel. Woody Allen called those killings "state-sponsored brutality".

The real Israel, he said, was intended to be a haven not so much for Jews as for Jewish values. How could those values be reconciled with policies which so exactly mimicked the evil done to Jewish people through history?

It is hard to understand why the United States tolerated the recent weeks of civilian murder in Lebanon. Ever since 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld and others have propounded the doctrine of the defensive attack, i.e. that democracies under possible threat from "tyrants" should strike before the enemy grows strong. Having tested that policy to disastrous effect in Iraq, Bush's advisers may have wished to see how well or badly it worked in taking out Hizbullah in Lebanon. Now they know.

What ordinary Americans made of all this is still anyone's guess. Did they hear much about it at all? On the Sunday after the massacre at Qana, American PBS radio, Public Broadcasting Service - by far the most objective electronic outlet - carried only the scantiest coverage.

In the last presidential election, neither Bush nor Kerry had much to say about the Middle East. Many Jewish Americans still vote Democrat and probably share the views of Woody Allen. The current Lebanese adventure, orchestrated by a US regime led by right-wing Christians, suggests two things. One: that there are powerful pro-Israeli backers of the Bushites who will bankroll the Republicans in the next election. Two: that there may well be an anti-Semitic element in that Christian right, which sees its leader embarked on a new "crusade" against "Islamic fascism".

Americans, as a people, are far better than this foreign policy, for which they never voted. They welcome strangers, love their families and believe that everyone deserves a second chance. So how have their leaders and soldiers come to this pass?

It may all come down to the founding myth of their nation. Americans see their ancestors as having built a democratic "city on a hill", a clearing of civilisation in an ungoverned wilderness.

For some of them, Israel represents an enlightened democracy planted in a desert filled with inscrutable tyrants and shifty nomads. The Arab, in this equation, is doomed to a role rather like that of the Native American - deprived of normal civil rights by virtue of his nomad status.

Now, the United Nations, after years of uncertainty, has found a possible role. Its leaders must be smiling grimly at the bitter irony of seeing that same Israeli army which so recently killed UN operatives now withdraw to make way for other members of that force. And at the double irony of a United States whose leaders have done so much to weaken the UN now call upon it for help.

There is a threat to world peace from zealots of various backgrounds, just as there is a threat to the state of Israel from the Iranian leadership. The UN is the one supra-national force that can embody the ideals of love and brotherhood at the core of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Israel's survival will depend not on its ability to provoke the zealots but on its willingness to share space and a sense of history with its Arab neighbours.

British director Ken Loach backs Palestinian call for boycott on Israel
Goel Pinto, Haaretz, 27/08/2006
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spa...ges/ 755249.html
British director Ken Loach has expressed support for a boycott on Israeli cultural institutions, giving the Palestinian figures behind the drive a significant boost. Loach, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival three months ago for his film about the Irish war of independence, The Wind the Shakes the Barley, has announced his support for the appeal to boycott Israeli institutions and even said that he urges others to do the same. "Palestinians are driven to call for this boycott after forty years of the occupation of their land, destruction of their homes and the kidnapping and murder of their civilians," said Loach in a statement. "They have no immediate hope that this oppression will end. As British citizens we have to acknowledge our own responsibility. We must condemn the British and U.S. governments for supporting and arming Israel." Loach, who directed such well-regarded films as Kes, Riff-Raff, and Carla's Song, also attacked his own government. "We must also oppose the terrorist activities of the British and U.S. governments in pursuing their illegal wars and occupations," he said. "It is impossible to ignore the appeals of Palestinian comrades," he concluded, adding that, "I would decline any invitation to the Haifa Film Festival or other such occasions." Loach had received an invitation from the Haifa Film Festival in recent weeks. The statement by Loach indicates that he is joining the ranks of international film festivals that have cancelled the participation of Israeli filmmakers, in the wake of IDF recent activity in Lebanon and Gaza. The Lussas Documentary Film Festival in France was scheduled to devote a category this year to Israeli documentary cinema, but cancelled screenings of several of the films, following the outbreak of the fighting.

Irish Health Services trammeled in English mistakes

Troubled software firm announces £344m losses
25-08-06

The British company which signed a €56 million contract with the Health Service Executive (HSE) last year to provide an electronic patient records system for hospitals in Ireland, announced annual losses of £343.8 million Stg (€507.5 million) this morning.

iSoft announced the losses of £343.8 Stg (€507.5 million) for the year to April 30, including an impairment charge of £351.4 (€518.7 million).

iSoft, which has seen its share price plummet by 90 per cent this year and earlier this month suspended its chief operating officer after discovering irregularities in its 2004 and 2005 accounts, has been paid €10 million by the HSE to provide an electronic patient records system for hospitals.

The HSE announced this week that it was closely monitoring developments within the firm with which it signed the €56 million contract last year.

The company has also been hit by a string of problems related to a £6.2 billion (€9.1 billion) project to upgrade computer systems for Britain's public health service and said yesterday it was being investigated by the UK financial services watchdog for possible accounting irregularities.