Chris Mars Updates

New worked posted now under LATEST including the new film “Flowers for Jupiter”:

http://www.chrismarspublishing.com/home.htm

Solo exhibition “Only Tenants Reside” continues at Mesa Contemporary Arts (AZ) through August 1.

Solo exhibition added at Erie Art Museum (PA) October 23, 2010 through January 23, 2011.

Group exhibitions:

Metamorphosis, a presentation of beinArt International Surreal Art Collective
CoproGallery (Santa Monica, CA) this Saturday through June 26
www.coprogallery.com

100 Artists See Satan, a Benefit for Grand Central Art Center
Cal State Fullerton (Santa Ana, CA) June 26 through July 3, 2010
www.grandcentralartcenter.com

Lead Poisoning, an exhibition of drawings curated by Jason D’Aquino
Last Rites Gallery (New York, NY) July 10 through July 25, 2010
www.lastritesgallery.com

Additional dates and information on the website under EXHIBITION

STORE features limited editions and Chris’s TOLERANCE, which can be personalized

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How China and India Sabotaged the UN Climate Summit

On Thursday evening, Denmark’s Queen Margrethe hosted a gala dinner for world leaders at the parliament building. On the sidelines of the event, the Chinese leader heard a rumor that the US government had scheduled an important round of negotiations without inviting him personally. Wen Jiabao was offended and withdrew to his hotel room, where, to the irritation of the other leaders, he remained for much of the remainder of the conference.

Instead, he sent his negotiator He Yafei to the nightly meeting of world leaders. Together, they asked the Danish host to reduce the maze of documents to a few, key pages. They still contained bold statements, such as the goal of a 50-percent reduction in global CO2 emissions by 2050 (compared with a 1990 benchmark). That kind of a commitment would have required that the United States, China and India also agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in half. At that point, Achim Steiner of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was still rejoicing over the potential agreement, saying: “This isn’t a train wreck. It really has teeth!”

With a success of this magnitude, the European leaders, especially Angela Merkel, would have been able to return home for the Christmas holidays with their heads held high.  …Read More?

Soldiers charged with using boy, 10, as human shield

Two Israeli soldiers were charged in a military court yesterday with forcing a 10-year-old Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip to handle objects they suspected of being rigged to explode.

The soldiers were indicted for “ordering the boy to open cases that they thought were explosives”, Major Dorit Toval, the prosecutor, said. The alleged crime took place during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military onslaught waged more than a year ago with the aim of halting Hamas rocket fire at southern Israel. A gag order was placed barring publication of the names of the soldiers.

An army spokesman said the incident took place while troops conducted sweeps of a building in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood. No date was given for the incident. The soldiers were charged with exceeding their authority and behaviour unbecoming a soldier.

“There is no need to mention that this is a transgression that has no place within the ranks of the military,” Ms Toval added, in remarks broadcast on the state-run Voice of Israel radio. “There are clear rules also in regard to the waging of combat. In operational situations, soldiers must safeguard [these rules] during every campaign.”

Colonel Ilan Katz, the lawyer defending the two soldiers, termed the charges “hallucinatory and contrived”. “It would have been better if this [indictment] had not been submitted,” he added. Col Katz warned that a conviction of the soldiers could deter young people from serving in combat units in the future.

But Yehuda Shaul, an activist in the dissident soldiers’ group Breaking the Silence, which gathers testimonies from soldiers, said, “The use of human shields in Operation Cast Lead was not so exceptional. By prosecuting two low-ranking soldiers, the military is trying to shift the discussion away from the big policies that came from high up in Cast Lead and which were wrong: permissive rules of engagement or mass destruction of property that had nothing to do with protecting our troops,” Mr Shaul added. …Read More?

New Deftones has Dropped!

One of My Personal Favorites! Fucking Bad Ass!

Underemployment Hits 20% in Mid-March

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s underemployment measure hit 20.0% on March 15 — up from 19.7% two weeks earlier and 19.5% at the start of the year. Gallup Daily tracking makes it possible to monitor the underemployment rate throughout the month, rather than just once per month, making it the best and most timely way to measure the U.S. jobs situation.

The findings underscore why Americans say the most important problem facing the nation today is jobs and unemployment. Gallup’s underemployment measure is based on more than 20,000 phone interviews collected over a 30-day period and reported daily. Gallup’s results are not seasonally adjusted and tend to be a precursor of government reports by approximately two weeks. (Read More)?

Gunman tries to attack Lenin’s corpse in Red Square

The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin’s carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital’s most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions.

“My main demand is the quick bulldozing of the mausoleum which contains the body of the anti-Christ,” he said. “I wanted to open fire on the tomb with an assault rifle but I was advised not to do that in case the tomb is armour-plated.”"I have drawn attention to this issue with my actions,” he added.

Lenin’s waxy presence at the heart of the Russian capital 86 years after his death continues to divide Russian society, with many older people believing he should be left where he is.

Others insist he should be re-buried near his mother in St Petersburg, arguing that it is incongruous for his corpse to remain on Red Square almost two decades after Soviet Communism was rejected.

Police say they spotted Karpentsov behaving strangely near the mausoleum and that he viciously beat a police officer who confronted him before shooting and wounding the man. (Read More)?

Cro Magnon skull supports theory that human brains have begun to shrink

Humans like to portray themselves as a sophisticated life form driven by brain rather than brawn. So they may be surprised by a project to reconstitute a 28,000-year-old skull from remains found in France.

This has provided evidence to support a theory that our brains have begun to shrink.

The French team that claims to have produced one of the best replicas yet of an early modern human skull say that it is 15 to 20 per cent bigger than ours. No one suggests that we are 15 to 20 per cent more stupid than Cro Magnon 1, the best preserved of five skeletons discovered in 1868 in the Cro Magnon cave in the Dordogne, because there is only a minor link between brain size and intelligence.

It may be that, rather like computers, our brains are becoming more efficient even as they grow smaller. But the project could shed light on a human evolutionary question that has divided and bemused the specialists: if indeed our heads have started to shrivel, why is this happening?

Cro Magnon 1 has been kept in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is believed to have been a well-built, elderly man about 6ft tall. Already known to scientists worldwide, Cro Magnon 1 will become even more famous next week when a mold of his skull will be shown at the American National Museum of Natural History in Washington. (Read More)?

Caught on camera: The cruel taunts of teenagers that killed man with learning difficulties

This is an absolutely horrible story.

These haunting pictures show the extent to which a man with learning difficulties suffered 17 years of torment at the hands of youths, before he collapsed and died in his garden.

A film captured on a mobile phone shows how David Askew’s agitators would stand inches from his garden fence and hurl abuse at him.

On Wednesday the 64-year-old could take no more and, as he tried to protect his property, he suffered a suspected heart attack and died on the spot.

During the short film taken during a recent confrontation, a clearly agitated Mr Askew can be seen biting his hand out of frustration as he is abused.

He is then mocked and chased along the pavement outside his home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester.

As the pictures emerged a chief constable whose force was criticised for failing to stop the yobs for his death blamed the local council for the tragedy.

Peter Fahy, of Greater Manchester Police demanded to know why Mr Askew had not been re-housed, despite suffering 17 years of abuse from youngsters.

Mr Askew died in his garden after confronting a group who had broken down his gate and were interfering with his mother’s mobility scooter on Wednesday night.

While Mr Askew’s mother Rose, 89, has praised police for the steps they took to make them safer, neighbours have claimed officers and Tameside Council did little to solve the family’s problems and said the bullying killed him. (Read More)?

Brain scan can read people’s thoughts: researchers

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person’s mind, researchers said Thursday.

British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.

“We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces,” said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.

“We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.”

The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.

The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories — recollections of everyday events — are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.

In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario. (Read More)?

Woman tries to shut down Large Hadron Collider over apocalypse fears

The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.

The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”

“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled.

CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

Housed inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the collider was started with great fanfare in September 2008, only to break down after nine days for the next 14 months.

It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels which began last month. (Read More)?

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