Caspian Report: Storm Clouds Gathering

Caspian Report has a good synopsis on India and the growing conflict between it and China - although I don't agree with all their proposed remedies:

Londonistans bleak future | The UK has just had one lost decade, and is about to enter a second

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10065143/The-UK-has-just-had-one-lost-decade-and-is-about-to-enter-a-second.html

Sent via Flipboard

sent from galaxy note, pardon brevity

Chinese Man 'Desecrates' Koran in Kashmir

Who knows what really happened - but Pak authorities are holding him:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22578490

Let's see how China reacts to this.

japan stands up to the hans. good on you, abe!

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578044-shinzo-abe-has-vision-prosperous-and-patriotic-japan-economics-looks-better?fsrc=nlw|hig|5-16-2013|5722602|35042158|

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sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity

First Person Plural: Microbiome

It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes. Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts with whom we coevolved.

Where do these all-important bifidobacteria come from and what does it mean if, like me, you were never breast-fed? Mother’s milk is not, as once was thought, sterile: it is both a “prebiotic” — a food for microbes — and a “probiotic,” a population of beneficial microbes introduced into the body. Some of them may find their way from the mother’s colon to her milk ducts and from there into the baby’s gut with its first feeding. Because designers of infant formula did not, at least until recently, take account of these findings, the guts of bottle-fed babies are not optimally colonized.

Most of the microbes that make up a baby’s gut community are acquired during birth — a microbially rich and messy process that exposes the baby to a whole suite of maternal microbes. Babies born by Caesarean, however, a comparatively sterile procedure, do not acquire their mother’s vaginal and intestinal microbes at birth.

NYT: Some of My Best Friends Are Germs

7 Charged with Tresspassing

7 young men and women - recent chemical engineering grads from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - have been charged with trespassing after being discovered after midnight in a restricted area at the largest drinking water reservoir in Massachussetts:

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/05/quabbin_breach_sparks_probe

While it's good to see young Muslims trying to improve their education, why do it after midnight in a restricted no-trespassing zone?

Quabbin Reservoir is one of the largest drinking water supplies in the United States.

'Wrong to Link ATM Heist to India'

First, the hackers, quite possibly insiders, broke into computer records at a few credit card processing companies, first in India and then the U.S. This has happened before but here's what was new: They didn't just take information. They actually raised the limit on prepaid debit cards kept in reserves at two large banks.
The next step was technically simpler, almost an arts-and-crafts activity.
Crime ring members in 27 countries ran used plastic cards, just about anything with a standard magnetic strip, through handheld magnetic stripe encoders, widely available online for less than $300. Those devices allow users to change information on magnetic stripes or to write new cards with a simple swipe.
In this case, the stripes were rewritten with information from the hackers. That allowed the thieves to turn the cards into gold, instantly transforming them into prepaid debit cards with unlimited amounts of money stored on them.

Telegraph India: India first victim in ATM heist chain