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According to Nigerian sources, the Fulbe bandits were also in possession of G3 assault rifles. Symbolic image: Edmond HUET. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Heavily armed Fulbe gangs have dismissed Boko Haram as a major threat

On 26. During a visit to the residents of the Sabon Birni district on May 1, the governor of the Nigerian state of Sokoto personally ared them that the situation was under control. Only hours later, heavily armed men on motorcycles attacked five villages in the district, killing 74 people.

A remote device that enables telepresence via the Internet

Now robots are gradually moving into everyday life. Of course, there are those designed to do real work like mowing lawns or vacuuming, but the real invasion will be by robots that are or serve as toys. And if they can be useful like iRobot-LE, then we will quickly get used to the new housemates, while the children grow up with them quite naturally.

The robot, which weighs more than 20 kilograms, does not look particularly animal-like like some of its colleagues, but it does not have to be in order to be able to show the course of a personality. R2-D2 from Star Wars was the model for iRobot-LE, in order to create a robot that is as "personal and emotional robots" to develop. It is praised for its long, elegant neck, for example, but also for its allegedly coarse vocabulary, which it uses to express itself "emotional" expressing himself. Its head actually looks like that of an SF creature, and it is also just high enough to make contact with a seated person at eye level, which was obviously important to the manufacturers to perhaps bring some equality into the game. He can also look out the window or on a table. "We wanted the robots to be friendly and for people to understand them as helpers in the house", says Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot. In addition to the house robot, which can even go up and down stairs and avoid obstacles, the company is also launching a robotic doll together with Hasbro.

A guest article by Jimmy Schulz, Member of the Bundestag

In the last few weeks, a debate has been making waves. The revelations of the Chaos Computer Club e.V. have caused a stir among politicians and IT experts, as well as the media. Accusations and counter-attacks, allegations and declarations of innocence have dominated the debate. One thing almost all involved had in common: lack of expertise.

The discussion often confused and misunderstood the various options available to investigators. The analyzed Trojans are – until now – exclusively Trojans, which were used on the basis of an order for source telecommunication surveillance. This allows the interception of communication at the source (end device), if no other "classical" TKu method is effective. In classical TKu, a communication is usually tapped at the exchange without the need to intervene in the terminal device used. In most cases, this involves the interception of Voice Over IP (VOIP) conversations such as e.B. Skype.

If shareware can be used indefinitely in the year 2000?

The WDR-Computerclub has uncovered that current shareware in the year 2000 shows almost unlimited test periods. Caused by a defective Y2K programming, which allows a usage period of 100.

Not without a sly laugh Wolfgang Back from the WDR-Computerclub presented a new Y2K bug in the last show. After installing the shareware program "Homesite" a period of use of 30 days was agreed with the current date. After that the tester is obliged to either delete the program or to purchase the usage rights against payment of the registration fee. An experimental change of the date to a day in the year 2000 resulted in the surprising information for the test person that the program was still running for 36 days.500 days of testing. The computer magazine has not tested other programs, but suspects this bug in other shareware versions.

US utopia, tax haven, navel of the universe: transfers between pop and politics in Panama

Directly on the shore is a restaurant with a view of a gigantic nerve cord of water, which is navigated by ships weighing tons. On the other shore, skyscrapers sprout into the sky, metallic-smooth structures that stand so close together as if they wanted to warm themselves to one another. What looks like a mixture of Singapore and Istanbul is Panama City in "The Tailor of Panama". This is the kind of image John Boorman presented at the beginning of the 21st century. In the early twentieth century, Panama introduced the world to the capital of a country that had hitherto been a U.S. colony and had thus been subjected to Washington’s projections to a considerable degree.

Panama’s bullfighting image can’t really decide between the U.S. and Spain. Photo: Panamanian Tourism Institute

Two billion US dollars are to be spent annually by the rich for this purpose

While the walls in front of "Economic refugees" For a lot of money, many countries lure the rich with offers to buy a permanent residence permit or even a single passport in exchange for investments or the purchase of real estate. Greece, a country in dire straits, is already offering a minimum price of 250 euros for the purchase of a property.000 euros for a residence permit for the buyer and his family in Greece. The lure of this business model is that the buyers can travel to all other EU countries without visas. A work permit is not connected with it. Interest, according to the Greek Ministry of Interior, came mainly from people from China, Russia and Arab countries.

Thus, Greece has undercut Cyprus, where you can only buy a 300.000 euros to obtain a permanent residence permit. Here, too, the focus is on Russians and Chinese. If you want a Cypriot passport and citizenship, you have to set up a company in Cyprus and have a turnover of more than 10 million euros a year. Cyprus advertises that it has one of the lowest tax rates in the EU, but as an EU member is a door opener to other EU countries. Very rich people (HNWI) are also attractive, who can buy a Cypriot citizenship with an investment of at least 15 million euros.

With 300 celebrities and other bloggers, journalist Arianna Huffington is launching a new kind of online publication that could change the blogosphere, but also traditional journalism

There is still the hype about bloggers, who are supposed to change, if not revolutionize, journalism, the public sphere and the flow of information. And as it always does, what was once avant-garde, or at least innovative, and brought a new, initially not primarily commercial, moment into play, "disarmed", when it is stylized into a fashion and imitated by the masses. Plotzlich mussenen alle bloggen, so irgendwie etwas ein bisschen Subjektive einigermaben kontinuierlich von sich geben, weil das fur Aufmerksamkeit sorgt und moglich auch Geld einbringt. You don’t want to miss anything.

What was once said by "below" or at least carried this myth with it – and was also impressive because of the passion of the followers, who select and evaluate the global information and communication streams in their own way, enter new information or draw the public’s attention to certain topics, will be eroded in its dynamics when it is no longer just the "Nobodies" (Rankism), but the celebrities and attention professionals penetrated in.

Image: Rosneft

As oil companies need heavy crude oil, which has so far come from Venezuela, a U.S.-sanctioned country steps in for an equally sanctioned country

Sometimes sanctions follow a strange logic. In January and February, the U.S. was still importing more than 26 million barrels of crude oil from Venezuela, daily between 500.000 and 700.000 barrels. That was already somewhat less than one year before. In February it was still 239.000 barrels per day. At the end of January, the U.S. government banned imports from the Venezuelan state-owned company PdVSA, causing demand in Venezuela to fall from almost 1.2 million barrels in January to less than 740,000 in March.000 in March. In April, 139.000 barrels per day were exported to the USA, and by the end of April, with the entry into force of the embargo, nothing more.

To strengthen and improve the internal market

Everyone is concerned about consumers, including the EU, of course. "So that markets serve consumers", says the subtitle of the EU consumer barometer. But, it would seem, consumer policy is only a means to an end. And he is already a neoliberal: "Demand for innovation and increased efficiency" of the economy.

The EU’s internal market is not accepted enough by its 500 million people, especially in e-commerce, i.e. electronic mail order, too little is being done, the EU Commission finds. For this reason, consumer complaints in all 27 EU countries will now be uniformly recorded and evaluated by the Commission. Once this is recorded in a uniform way and reported to the Commission, everything will work better, said Briton David Meir (Directorate General SANCO, that is Health and Consumers) recently at an event in Vienna, where the bodies and consumer organizations dealing with consumer complaints should be committed to a uniform electronic complaint form.

Loricifera, life without oxygen. Picture: Roberto Danovaro, Antonio Dell’Anno et al.

Scientists have discovered multicellular organisms in the Mediterranean that can live entirely without oxygen

Scientists have discovered the first multicellular organisms that can live and reproduce entirely without oxygen. What does not sound particularly exciting is nevertheless a sensation.