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GLOBAL NEWS MEDIA GAGGING ORDERS USED IN LEGAL BATTLEFIELD take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues. The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1.0 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No. other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail. Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was, and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months or a year at most. (Source: New Scientist, 1 November 2009, http://tinyurl.com/yfbjrgr) several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously. Yet last week in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference—an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change—Latif conceded hat the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are like- y entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool". The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea hat the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would absorb much of the green- ouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, and then would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land. But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead and looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. (Source: The Calgary Herald, 19 September 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ mwpktv) Tr media gagging order is becoming a troublingly frequent weapon in the legal battlefield. Injunctions are a form of court order, usually preventing the recipient from doing something. Imagine you know something important about an individual, "A", which you attempt to publish or communicate to others. You are sued by A in an attempt to eep that information confidential— not altogether an unusual sequence of events. In the course of the legal proceedings brought by A, you are ikely to receive a court order stating something like "the publication of all information relating to these proceedings is expressly prohibited". f asked by a friend or colleague about the case brought against you by A, you would have to say: "I can't alk about it; I've been injuncted." More alarming still is the fact that corporations, with motives centred more on their brand and reputation han personal disaster, are invoking hese orders, gagging others from saying they have been gagged let alone from saying whatever they initially wanted to speak out about. (Source: The Guardian, 23 September 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ydl6srx) SCIENTIST PULLS ABOUT-FACE ON GLOBAL WARMING wee a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy. But this was not so in the case of Professor Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute, one of the leading climate modellers in the world. Professor Latif is the recipient of BEHIND IN YOUR PAYMENTS, WE'RE GOING TO ote FoRECLOSURE Someruille EU's "ORWELLIAN" PLAN TO MONITOR BEHAVIOUR Ti European Union (EU) is developing "Orwellian" technologies designed to scour the Internet and CCTV images for "abnormal behaviour". A five-year research program, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programs which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from websites, discussion forums, file servers, peer- to-peer networks and_ even individual computers. Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence". 8 * NEXUS DECEMBER 2009 - JANUARY 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com