The Right’s Blogger Provocateur

By JEREMY W. PETERS NEW YORK TIMES

MINNEAPOLIS — Andrew Breitbart wasn’t supposed to be sitting here in a television studio makeup chair. But when he heard that Anthony Weiner was about to announce his resignation, he dropped everything.

Mr. Breitbart, the conservative author and blogger who first published Mr. Weiner’s suggestive self-portraits, had ditched his book-signing in central Illinois and hopped on a flight earlier than planned to the Twin Cities, where he was booked as a marquee attraction at RightOnline, a conservative bloggers conference.

“To put myself in Decatur, Ill., without a satellite connection would have put me in a bad situation,” he explained as a woman applied a layer of foundation to his jowly face in preparation for his appearance on CNN. (He had just finished a phone interview with Fox News; Sean Hannity’s radio show would follow; then a quick break before sitting down with a documentary film crew.)

Part performance artist, part polemicist, Mr. Breitbart, 42, has used his network of Web sites and their legions of followers to bring conservative media red meat. Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of Acorn workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to Acorn, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his Web sites — which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood — tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don’t, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

“On the right, he is seen as an investigative journalist along the lines of Woodward and Bernstein,” said James B. McPherson, author of “The Conservative Resurgence and the Press.”

The damage Mr. Breitbart suffered to his credibility after he posted a tipster’s edited video that showed an Agriculture Department official, Shirley Sherrod, making what appeared to be prejudiced remarks seems not to matter as far as his fans are concerned. Also, the Acorn videos appeared to show a man walking into Acorn offices dressed as a pimp, when in fact he was not.

“I think his actions show that if he’s not willing to distort, he is at least careless with the facts,” Mr. McPherson added. “But there are no standards of fact anymore for a lot of people. We have gone from selecting sources of opinion that we agree with to selecting facts we agree with.”

In person, Mr. Breitbart attracts a similar split between blistering condemnation or fawning adulation.

A sampling from his in-box recently: “You are nothing but a malicious moron and a filthy looking bum.”

“I hope you rot in hell.”

“I’d like to have 15 minutes alone with you.”

But as Mr. Breitbart barreled his husky, 6-foot-1 frame through the halls of the Hilton here for the RightOnline conference, he could barely move 10 feet without being stopped and exalted.

“You’re an inspiration to me,” gushed one young woman.

“You’re my hero,” a middle-aged female admirer declared.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” said one man, grinning spectacularly as Mr. Breitbart posed for a picture with him.

Conservative media does not lack for big personalities (see: Limbaugh, Rush; Beck, Glenn; or Coulter, Ann). But where Mr. Breitbart stands out is through his accessibility. He gives out his cellphone number in speeches and passes along his personal e-mail address to almost anyone who asks. If you write him, chances are you will hear back.

“If you’re a citizen journalist,” said James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who filmed the Acorn sting videos and passed them along to Mr. Breitbart, “you have to be responsive to people, you have to listen to the people around you. And you can’t do that if you’re sitting behind a golden microphone making $40 million a year.”

When Mr. Breitbart is not checking his BlackBerry, which pings continually with the hundreds of e-mails and text messages he receives each day, he is talking on the phone. When he was exiting the lobby of his hotel one night, a woman approached him to pitch a story. He listened patiently for a minute and then said, “I’ll forget all this. So e-mail me at andrew@breitbart.com.”

He grew up in West Los Angeles among many of the liberal types he now pillories. That gives him a certain credibility among fans who see his as a redemption case. “I admit it, I’m from L.A. I still am shallow. Don’t anyone think otherwise. It’s part of the experience out there,” he said in a speech at RightOnline, bringing the audience to its feet.

After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, he drifted around Los Angeles looking for a career. Arianna Huffington gave him his first big break in media when she hired him as her researcher in 1997. Matt Drudge, a mutual friend who ran an online newsletter and Web site about politics and Hollywood gossip, had introduced them.

He would later go to work for Mr. Drudge, helping him manage The Drudge Report. He gained a Web following of his own by routing articles featured on The Drudge Report through his own Web site, Breitbart.com. Then in 2004, Ms. Huffington called. “Do you have any ideas for a Web site?” he recalls her asking. He helped her introduce the site but left after a few months.

He may not have liked the politics, but he embraced the model of assembling a nationwide network of mostly unpaid contributors. “I was going to have to develop a public persona that caused people to be willing to write for me often and in most cases for free,” he said.

In the summer of 2009, Mr. O’Keefe approached him with videos he had secretly recorded in Acorn offices on the East Coast. Mr. Breitbart borrowed $25,000 from his father and started a site, Big Government, where the videos would be posted. They quickly went viral, consuming official Washington.

The most notorious video he put up — one that almost ruined his career — was a two-minute clip of Ms. Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official, telling an N.A.A.C.P. gathering that she did not help a white man as much as she could have with his failing farm. The headline said “NAACP Awards Racism.”

But when the N.A.A.C.P. released a longer version of the video, it showed clearly that Ms. Sherrod’s story was about overcoming racial prejudice, and that she did indeed go to great lengths to help the farmer. Defending himself, Mr. Breitbart said that the video came to him already edited, and that the crowd applauded when Ms. Sherrod said she did not help the man.

Critics seized on it as evidence that Mr. Breitbart selectively chooses content that reflects poorly on political opponents. But the episode only seemed to help bolster his status as a rising star on the political right.

“I just like the work he’s done,” said Andrew Madsen, a 21-year-old college student from Watertown, Minn., who waited in line at the Hilton to have Mr. Breitbart autograph a copy of his new book, “Righteous Indignation.” “Everybody has their biases. But there’s a big bias toward liberalism and big government. At least he’s attempting to provide an outlet that provides an alternative perspective.”

Mr. Breitbart is always looking for new ways to channel his seemingly bottomless well of playful outrage. In Minneapolis, he decided to crash the mostly liberal Netroots Nation blogger conference that was taking place just down the street. His plans to rent a dunk tank and charge people $50 each to throw a baseball didn’t pan out.

He bounded in uninvited, accompanied by a 12-person entourage that included a documentary film crew, a security guard, several reporters and some fans.

A crowd of bloggers quickly gathered around him, Flip cameras in hand. One of them repeatedly shrieked questions about whether Mr. Breitbart had ever patronized a prostitute, used cocaine or looked at gay pornography. Mr. Brietbart said little in response and mostly grinned.

Another onlooker called him a racist and condemned him to hell. The growing crowd — chanting “Coward! Coward!” — became so hostile that the guard protecting Mr. Breitbart eventually had to whisk him out a back door.

“Tee-hee, tee-hee! Bedlam ensued!” he laughed, reading coverage of his stunt later. “Isn’t it funny that wherever I go, crazy stuff happens?”

When a reporter pointed out that the pandemonium was probably not coincidental, he paused for a moment.

“Are you saying it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy?” he asked, seemingly sincere. “I’ll have to think about that.”

The incredible journey of NASA spacecraft Dawn

NASA spacecraft Dawn, the largest probe ever launched by the agency, is slowly approaching protoplanet Vesta, where it will spend a year in exploratory orbit before moving on to Ceres.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

June 24, 2011

NASA's pioneering Dawn spacecraft, a year late in being launched and 20% over budget, is slowly creeping up on the protoplanet Vesta and is expected to enter orbit around it about July 16, the first stop on a remarkable journey that will later take the craft to the larger dwarf planet Ceres.

The craft, the largest probe ever launched by NASA, is about half-way through its three-month approach phase to Vesta, 96,000 miles away and closing in at the sedate speed of about 260 mph.

The whole procedure is happening so slowly, in terms of normal asteroid flybys and planetary encounters, that scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge will not be able to calculate precisely when the craft entered orbit until after the fact.

The craft's visit to Vesta will be the first prolonged encounter with an object in the main asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter and the first trip to a protoplanet, a large body that almost became a planet.

Both Vesta and Ceres are thought to have been formed when the solar system itself was being assembled from the dust that condensed into the sun and planets. Researchers once thought that both were remnants of a planet that formed and then was destroyed by a massive collision with a moon or some other object.

They now believe, however, that the asteroid belt contains the remnants of a planet whose formation was disrupted by the gravitational effects of nearby Jupiter. As such, its composition should mirror that of the earliest objects orbiting the sun.

"This tiny world … is a window into the early origin of the solar system and the terrestrial planets," said Carol Raymond of JPL, deputy principal investigator for Dawn. Learning about it "will give us better tools to understand the thousands of fragments that are out there in the asteroid belt."

Dawn was originally scheduled to launch in the summer of 2006, but testing problems with the engines delayed the launch until September 2007. Those problems also raised the cost of the mission from a planned $373 million to $446 million at launch.

Dawn is a unique craft and mission on a variety of accounts. For one, it is not powered by a conventional rocket engine but by three ion engines. Electrical fields produced by two 27-foot solar panels accelerate xenon ions to high speed, expelling them out the three engines and providing a thrust about the same as "a single piece of paper pressing down on your hand," according to JPL's Robert Mase, the Dawn project manager.

That may not seem like much, but by the time the craft has used up its load of 937 pounds of xenon, the engines will have provided 24,000 mph of velocity change.

NASA's Deep Space 1 used similar technology in its 1999 mission to sweep by the asteroid Braille, where it produced disappointingly fuzzy images of the object — which some believe to have been ejected from Vesta.

Dawn, however, will go into orbit around Vesta and stay there for a year before climbing out of orbit and proceeding on to Ceres, which it is expected to reach in 2015. No spacecraft has accomplished such a feat before.

Its initial orbit around Vesta will be a little under 10,000 miles high, but it will spiral in, eventually getting as close as 120 miles above the surface, where it should produce breathtaking pictures of the craters. Spectrometers on the craft will also map minerals on the surface and in the craters, which should lead to a clearer picture of how Vesta formed.

Researchers are particularly interested in learning if Vesta has an iron core.

Actual science will begin in the second week of August, Mase said.

Vesta is a great big rock, about 359 miles by 348 miles by 285 miles. The only feature on it that can be discerned from Earth is a massive crater 285 miles across and eight miles deep.

Scientists think they already know a lot about the composition of Vesta. Over the years, repeated collisions with other asteroids have knocked off a lot of material that is floating between the Earth and Vesta. Gravitational interactions with Jupiter propel it toward Earth. An estimated one in every 20 meteorites that strike Earth originated on Vesta, according to UCLA's Christopher Russell, Dawn principal investigator.

Researchers are perhaps even more eager to learn about Ceres. Recent research suggests that the 606-mile-wide dwarf planet may hold a buried ocean under a thick layer of ice. Some estimates suggest that Ceres might even have more water than Earth itself.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Candidates Running for Profit

Michael Medved Daily Beast

They have no shot at winning the White House and they know it. But Michael Medved says also-ran presidential candidates, from Herman Cain to Rick Santorum, have become adept at finding silver—and gold—linings.

As a fateful presidential race gradually takes shape, political junkies will feel both bemused and mystified by the persistence of marginal candidates who have no chance whatsoever of caucus or primary victories. In 2012, as in previous years, it ought to be obvious that some of these purported White House aspirants are actually running for profit, not for president.

This point came home to me during a startling 2007 conversation with a friend and colleague who hosts a successful radio talk show. He asked me, in confidence, what I thought about the idea of his declaring his candidacy for president of the United States. Without hesitation, I told him it sounded like a disastrous idea. He’d need to give up his well-established show once he became an official candidate and would never receive serious consideration by pundits and commentators, as he’d never run for office before. Moreover, he’d hate the process of begging friends and strangers for campaign cash, with no realistic prospect of victory against rivals with fatter wallets and bigger names.

My friend laughed and acknowledged that he’d never advance to the White House but said he believed the campaign process could boost his media career. After the publicity surrounding even the feeblest presidential non-juggernaut, he could command larger radio audiences, bigger book advances, higher speaking fees, and the generally enhanced notoriety that attaches to anyone who travels the country running for the world’s most powerful office.

As for the likelihood that journalists and opponents would scour his past to publicize some embarrassing scandal or shortcoming—another of my objections—he argued that even this humiliation would help publicize his name and enhance his reputation, particularly if they found something juicy to dominate a news cycle or two.

In the end, common sense, and a reluctant spouse, prevailed and my pal declined to make the race, though we both recognized, ruefully, that his lively mind and formidable rhetorical skills could have enlivened some of the preternaturally boring 2008 debates. Our conversation also persuaded me that under the right circumstances, a presidential campaign that made no sense politically might earn dollars and cents in career enhancements.

Consider, for example, the obnoxious career of the appalling Alan Keyes. In 1996, Keyes launched the first of three utterly quixotic campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination, following a brief tenure at the State Department (where his most conspicuous title made him assistant secretary of state for international organizations); a few jobs with think tanks (American Enterprise Institute and Citizens Against Government Waste); and two disastrous senatorial campaigns in Maryland (in 1992, he drew only 29 percent of the general-election vote as the Republican nominee).

“

Even candidates with pathetic primary showings, negligible delegate totals, lousy poll ratings, and modest political war chests can register positive results on the scoreboard of personal progress.

”

With few financial resources and no organized campaign apparatus, he nonetheless made strong impressions in televised appearances thanks to his impassioned eloquence and novelty status as the only black candidate in the Republican field. Subsequent bids for the presidency made no practical headway—in 2008, he memorably compared his candidacy to an aborted fetus—but turned the invariably angry Keyes into an oddball celebrity. He hosted a short-lived radio show and even got a brief place on the MSNBC cable schedule, under the puzzling title Alan Keyes Is Making Sense. He now conducts ceaseless fundraising efforts to keep alive his multiple challenges to President Obama’s citizenship status.

In short, even Keyes’ laughable presidential campaigns, including conducting a hunger strike and getting himself arrested when excluded from one televised debate in 1996, helped him emerge from anonymity, after a previous spate of failures and false starts.

Ron Paul’s three campaigns—as a libertarian in 1988, and as a Republican in 2008 and 2012—have served a similar purpose. He’s drawn few votes, with his libertarian candidacy earning less than one-half of 1 percent of the general-election ballots, but the once-obscure Texas congressman has become a bestselling author and prominent media commentator. His cult-like following produced a lavishly funded if startlingly ineffective organization, raising $25 million that resulted in 0.63 percent of GOP delegates at the convention, while providing jobs for numerous members of his extended family.

Other perennial candidates—Dennis Kucinich, Pat Buchanan, Jesse Jackson—became famous for their energetic and colorful campaigns, building their media profiles and, in Kucinich’s case, winning a beautiful young wife, regardless of the invariably disappointing results in primaries and caucuses.

These for-profit presidential ventures differed profoundly from earlier candidates who became notorious for their frequent but hopeless White House drives. Harold Stassen ran for president eight times between 1948 and 1992, but in his first two races, and as a youthful, popular Minnesota governor, he had been considered a serious candidate. Later, he ran increasingly forlorn campaigns to keep his name before the public and to hold on to just a bit of the national spotlight. Today’s careerist-campaigners run not to preserve the public’s attention, but to win significant coverage for the first time; to seize rather than retain that coveted spotlight.

In the 2012 race, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum have already succeeded in this strategy. I know and respect both candidates as sincere, deeply committed patriots and conservative activists who care passionately about the issues they discuss in their interviews, sparsely attended campaign events, and, most important, televised debates. Though they and their supporters will tell you that they are running to advance their ideas, they must also acknowledge, at least in private rumination, that other GOP contenders fight for virtually identical positions and that the chief result of their hopeless candidacies will be career enhancement.

Cain lost a Georgia Senate primary in his only prior run for public office and hosts a nighttime radio show in Atlanta, but his presidential drive exposed a much wider audience to his folksy charm and persuasive oratory. After the election, he’ll almost certainly get a far more prominent media gig, perhaps joining Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee on Fox News, write a bestselling book, and win five-figure speaking engagements.

Santorum has wandered the political wilderness since a crushing reelection defeat in Pennsylvania in 2006, but his presidential bid, highlighted by a smart, polished, forceful performance in the New Hampshire CNN debate, has already rejuvenated his career, making him a far more plausible possibility for future high office (either appointive or elected), major think tank positions, or as an enhanced voice in conservative media.

There’s something about standing on stage at candidate forums, in front of high-tech TV sets and eagerly cheering crowds, side by side with front-running, big-time contenders who could actually win the White House, that inescapably enhances personal prestige, regardless of thin electoral support or nonexistent prospects of victory.

In the media-driven circus atmosphere of modern nomination campaigns, even candidates with pathetic primary showings, negligible delegate totals, lousy poll ratings, and modest political war chests can register positive results on the scoreboard of personal progress. Winning isn’t everything in politics, but it’s never beside the point, and some contemporary presidential candidates have learned how to transcend mundane matters like vote totals in discovering new ways of winning.

‘Barefoot Bandit’ Pleads Guilty to 2-Year Theft Spree

By WILLIAM YARDLEY NY TIMES                                                          

SEATTLE — Colton Harris-Moore, the teenage fugitive who became known as the Barefoot Bandit during his two-year crime spree, pleaded guilty here on Friday to seven federal charges, including stealing airplanes, a boat and firearms and transporting them across state and sometimes national boundaries. He faces up to six and a half years in prison.

Mr. Harris-Moore, who inspired Facebook tribute pages and supportive T-shirts (“Momma Tried,” one said) for his remarkable ability to elude law enforcement over the years, smiled occasionally in court but said little beyond “Yes, sir” to Judge Richard A. Jones of United States District Court, and “guilty” seven times.

For all of the spectacle surrounding his case, Mr. Harris-Moore reached a plea deal with the government in part by pledging that he would not profit from publicizing it in the future. A Seattle entertainment lawyer, Lance Rosen, said Friday that he was negotiating the sale of rights to Mr. Harris-Moore’s story but that any proceeds would go toward the more than $1.4 million in restitution Mr. Harris-Moore owes for the planes, boat and other items he stole.

After Mr. Harris-Moore entered his plea in federal court, Jenny Durkan, the United States attorney for Western Washington, told reporters, “Should one dime cross palms, it comes to the government.”

Mr. Harris-Moore grew up poor and a victim of abuse on Camano Island, north of Seattle in Puget Sound. He was charged with his first crime at 12 and began his spree after escaping from a juvenile halfway house in April 2008. Over the next two years, Mr. Harris-Moore broke into banks, stole Cessna airplanes, a 34-foot powerboat, semiautomatic pistols and a stream of Ford trucks and Cadillacs before finally being caught after crash-landing a plane on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas on July 4, 2010. He had no formal flight training.

He is scheduled to be sentenced in October. But before then, state prosecutors in four Washington counties are expected to pursue as many as 40 charges, included first-degree burglary in which a handgun was involved, a charge that could keep him in prison longer than the federal charges do.

Asked in court how many years of school he completed, Mr. Harris-Moore, now 20 and a high school dropout, replied, “10 years.” His lawyer, John Henry Brown, told reporters after the hearing that Mr. Harris-Moore hoped eventually to attend college to study aviation and engineering.

Snake handler who mesmerized generations of tourists is dead By CAROL ROSENBERG MIAMI HERALDcrosenberg@miamiherald.com    Bill Haast delighted tourists five times a day at The Serpentarium on Dixie Highway in Miami. If snake venom holds the secret to a long life, then Bill Haast had the magic. The man who mesmerized generations of paying customers from 1947 to 1984 by extracting venom at his Miami Serpentarium as a spine-tingling South Florida attraction is dead. He died of natural causes on Wednesday in Punta Gorda, on Florida’s west coast, where he had made his home. He was 100 years old. Born William E. Haast on Dec. 30, 1910 in Paterson, N.J., he was a South Florida celebrity for surviving successive venomous snakebites. Friday, his wife Nancy put his lifetime tally at 172. The legacy left him immunized, enabling him to donate life-saving blood to 21 victims across the years. All survived, she said. Grainy black-and-white television footage from 1962, now part of the Wolfson Archive, shows a fit, toothy 51-year-old Haast in a hospital recovering from his 79th snake bite -- his first ever by a King Cobra. A rare survivor, he declared himself doing “very well, anxious to get back to work.” Why? “I must.” Haast’s passing reminded South Floridians of a certain age of the bygone era when entrepreneurs could set up quirky roadside attractions along Dixie Highway, US 1, to thrill both local school kids and wintering vacationers who fled the cold. “He was a really nice man with a big heart,” said his grand-niece Michelle Haast of Miami. “Not to mention pretty damn smart. And a bit crazy.” Twitter accolades came in from across the globe. The Reptile Centre in Northampton, England, declared him “an inspirational man within the world of reptiles.” In North Carolina, a chemist offered this salute: “Resssssssst in Peace Bill Haast.” Part scientist, part entertainer, Haast spent his early years in Miami as a mechanic for Pan Am, while he built the snake farm he called The Serpentarium along a portion of U.S. 1 that is today called Pinecrest. By the mid 1960s he was putting on five shows a day, dressed in a white lab coat, extracting venom to sell for scientific experimentation. “He was into it for the science on how snake venom affected the body,” said the grand-niece who worked at The Serpentarium as a teen in the 1980s. He had done research for a polio vaccine, sought a cure for multiple sclerosis. “He’d put on a show just to supplement the research for the while,” she said. “And in the end the research could take care of itself.” The attraction had a gift shop, 400-pound turtles, a 20-foot-long python. It also had a pit with a 12-foot-long crocodile called “Cookie” that weighed, literally, a ton. Tragically, a 6-year-old boy fell in and died in 1977. Haast went to the pit with a pistol the very next day and shot the croc. He closed up the business in 1984, moved to Utah for a few years but returned to Florida in 1990, and settled in a Punta Gorda ranch with Nancy, his third wife, and some 400 snakes that supplied his Miami Serpentarium Laboratories. “Miami was in Bill’s heart to the end,” his widow said. “It was his adopted city. No matter where we went, Miami was Bill’s real home.” By his 95th birthday, he was a bit of a recluse. He agreed to chat only by telephone with a Miami Herald reporter. “I know a lot of people in Miami still remember the Serpentarium and wonder what became of me,” he said, “that’s why I’m talking to you.’’ It was 2006 and he was still extolling the virtues of venom, saying he injected himself weekly with a cocktail from five snakes -- cobras, cottonmouths, kraits, mambas and rattlers -- homeopathy the Food and Drug Admnistration would never endorse. “I could become a poster boy for the benefits of venom,’’ Haast boasted. “If I live to be 100, I’ll really make the point.’’ And so he did. On Friday, the Roberson Funeral Home of Port Charlotte said arrangements were incomplete. Besides his wife, he left two daughters, Naia Hanna and Shantih, living in California. A son, William Haast Jr. predeceased him. He also left three grandchildren, two great grandchildren and two great great grandchildren.

 

Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

The Guardian UK

Under new laws being drawn up addicts would be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers 'treated like serial killers'

Boris Gryzlov with Vladimir Putin in 2007. Gryzlov says the scale of the country's drug problem 'threatens Russia's gene pool'. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AP

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people). Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper. The scale of the problem "threatens Russia's gene pool", he said. "We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us."

This year, President Dmitry Medvedev said drug abuse was cutting up to three percentage points off economic growth.

Injecting drug use is also accelerating Russia's Aids crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences. "The barons of narco-business must be put on a par with serial killers with the appropriate punishment in the form of a life sentence," said Gryzlov, who is chairman of the party.

Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy.

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany – addicts – a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

That could be a bleak prospect. Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

Several activists condemned Gryzlov's suggestion to "isolate" drug users from society.

"Sending more people to prison will not reduce drug addiction or improve public health," said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, an advocacy group for people with HIV which works with injecting drug users (IDUs). "Russian prisons are terrible places full of HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases. Drugs are often even more accessible there than anywhere else."

She added: "What we need instead of this harsh drug control rhetoric is greater emphasis on rehabilitation, substitution treatment, case management for drug users and protection from HIV."

HIV prevalence among IDUs in western countries is 1 or 2%, but lack of outreach work and the absence of opiate substitution (methadone) and other "harm reduction" measures mean the figure is 16% in Russia – rising to 60% in hotspots such as St Petersburg.

Denis Broun, the Moscow-based director of UNAIDS for Europe and central Asia, told the Guardian that Gryzlov's proposals could make matters even worse.

"It has been widely shown that criminalising people using drugs simply drives them underground and makes them much harder to reach with preventative measures," he said. "This is not an effective strategy for fighting HIV. Purely repressive measures do not work."

Shock: Windows 8 optimized for desktop tablets
Why the default user interface for desktop Windows 8 looks a lot like Microsoft's Windows Phone 7
Mike Elgan
Microsoft demonstrated the next version of Windows this week, and the operating system has an interface almost nobody expected or predicted.

The default interface for Windows 8 will look almost nothing like Windows 7, but will look and feel a heck of a lot like Microsoft's cell-phone operating system, Windows Phone 7.

What's going on here?
Way back in February 2007, I told you about the coming era of touch-screen desktop computing -- "an iPhone the size of a big-screen TV." I asked: "Will the desktop version of this third-generation UI come from Apple, or Microsoft?"

After four years, we still don't know the answer to that question. Apple could still beat Microsoft to the punch.

But this week we learned that Microsoft intends to ship the first desktop touch tablet version of Windows next year. More importantly, we know how Microsoft is going to manage the jarring transition from second-generation WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointing devices) computing to third-generation MPG (multi-touch, physics and gestures ) computing.

To gently-but-aggressively transition the Windows world to the next generation of computing, Microsoft is going to do something I hadn't even thought of: Microsoft will get millions of users to interact with their touch interface without touching. Windows 8 will combine the gestures and eye candy of tomorrow's touch tablets with the clunky mice and keyboards of yesterday's PCs.

A proven strategy
When Microsoft transitioned users from DOS to Windows back in the early 1990s, they made Windows a "shell" on top of DOS, but made the Windows UI the default. (Note that the less aggressive, legacy-friendly alternative to that would have been to ship DOS with the Windows shell as an optional application.) Microsoft didn't force everyone to suddenly abandon DOS and the DOS applications they had invested in. Anyone who wanted to launch and run a DOS program could do so, but in a DOS window within the Windows shell. Microsoft's strategy paid off, and Windows adoption happened quickly.

Microsoft plans to do exactly the same thing with Windows 8. The new operating system will default to the next-generation shell -- the Metro UI, which first showed up in the Windows Media Center, then the Zune, then Windows Phone 7.

That's right. When you install Windows 8, you'll be greeted not by a "desktop" with icons, but to a "personal mosaic of tiles," according to Microsoft's demo video. These are like icons in functionality -- when you click or tap them, they launch the associated applications. But unlike icons, they display data from the applications. In Microsoft's example, the e-mail tile shows new messages. The calendar tile shows today's appointments. A "My Investments" tile displays live stock prices. A Twitter tile shows a recent tweet.

The interface is so new that applications will have to be re-written for it from the ground up, just like DOS applications had to be re-written for Windows. These new applications will have interesting qualities. For example, they'll be written in either HTML5 or JavaScript. They'll launch full-screen, just like apps on an Apple iPad tablet, but will also optionally run two at a time, side-by-side. And even if you're using an old mouse-and-keyboard style desktop PC, the apps you'll use will be "designed for touch." You can cycle through multitasking applications with a simple swipe-from-the-left gesture.

But don't worry. Your old Windows applications will still run. Like in the earliest versions of Windows that ran DOS software in a special DOS mode, Windows applications will run in a "Desktop" or "Windows 7" mode. Best of all, you'll be able to run old Windows applications side-by-side with the Metro UI app of your choice.

Interestingly, the Metro UI handles files like the iPad -- documents and data files are associated with the application, and will be managed only from within applications. But in the Windows 7 window, you'll still have old-fashioned file management, where your data file locations are not associated with specific applications and can be moved copied, deleted or modified without reference to specific applications.

Note that these two generations of user interface will exist side-by-side only on PCs. Windows 8 will also run on devices powered by ARM chips made by a company called ARM Holdings. Traditionally, these chips power smartphones and tablets, and the slim operating systems designed for these mobile gadgets. Windows 8 will run on ARM devices, but the old interface will not be supported. ARM devices will run only the Metro UI, and the apps written for that platform.

So both your PC and tablet will run Windows 8, but only your PC will be able to run your current version of Office or QuickBooks. On the tablet, you'll have to wait for new, Metro-specific versions to be created.

Why Microsoft is doing this
People resist change. It's just human nature.

Users are going to love the touch-centric computing interfaces of tomorrow. But today, many Windows users just don't like the sound of it.

Whenever I predict desktop tablets, I get a lot of e-mail from the resistance. Touch is too limited, they say. An iPad-like interface is cramped and limiting. The arm position necessary to use a touch screen even at an angle is uncomforable. I need a real keyboard. I've grown attached to my mouse. I need hardcore multi-tasking.

Apple's strategy for overcoming resistance was to launch an entirely new device, rather than immediately replace an existing platform with a new one. Apple's MPG (multitouch, physics and gestures) interface was first used on Apple's first-ever cell phone. Because the entire device category was brand new to Apple, the company didn't ask users of existing Apple products to do things differently. The company's strategy is to start small and move up the food chain - first phones, then tablets, then multi-touch laptop and desktop touchpads, then desktops, which we'll see no doubt this year or next.

What we learned this week is that Microsoft has come up with an entirely different solution to the problem of user resistance to change: Microsoft intends to get us all using a touch interface with mice and keyboards first.

By the time we get used to doing that, we'll be happy to get rid of the peripheral hardware and just use our desktops like iPads, touching the screen directly. It will be the same interface, but much better because we'll be able to use multi-finger gestures and because we'll enjoy the innate psychological payoff of using an MPG device.

I think Microsoft's strategy is brilliant. I had all but written off Microsoft as clueless about the future of touch computing. But the company's latest demo changes everything.

Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Contact and learn more about Mike at Elgan.com, or subscribe to his free e-mail newsletter, Mike's List.

The Other Lady Gagas
What does the pop star have in common with an ancient Babylonian, a French-Irish noblewoman, and a fictional flapper? Her name.
By Jody Rosen SLATE
Lady Gaga—but which one?"I've always been Gaga," Lady Gaga told Rolling Stone in 2009, and spiritually speaking, she may be right. But for most of her life she was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—"Stef" to her friends. It was one of those friends, her ex-boyfriend and former manager, Rob Fusari, who gave the singer her nom de guerre, by accident, in 2004. Fusari sent Germanotta a text message that read, simply, "Radio Gaga," a reference to the 1984 hit by Queen. Or rather, Fusari tried to text "Radio Gaga"—his cellphone autocorrected "Radio" to "Lady." Germanotta had been looking for a stage name, and "Lady Gaga" had the right ring. Fusari told an interviewer: "She texted me back. 'That's it.' After that day she was Lady Gaga. She's like, 'Don't ever call me Stefani again.' "

As far pop-star aliases go, Lady Gaga is awfully good—an ideal combination of regal and ridiculous. It pays tribute to Queen's Freddie Mercury, the glam rock titan who is audibly one of Gaga's heroes. The honorific Lady strikes the right note of diva-ish pretension; there's a hint of Dada in Gaga.

But there's also 2,600 years of history in it. Did Germanotta know that she was not the first Lady Gaga—that she was staking claim to a title previously held by a Babylonian slave owner, an Irish-born French noblewoman, and a fictional habitué of the Roaring Twenties London party scene?

The first Lady Gaga enters the historical record in a letter, inscribed on Babylonian cuneiform tablet, dating from the sixth century B.C., probably during the reign of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The letter, addressed from Gaga to her father, Sa-pi-Bel, concerns minor domestic matters. It begins with Gaga chastising Sa-pi-Bel for not having written her recently—"Why … have my daughters and I passed the time in thirst for a letter from thee? Rack thy brains (for an excuse). ..."—before asking for advice about some stolen fruit. Evidently, this same Babylonian Gaga owned a Jewish slave named Barachiel, who several years after Gaga's death unsuccessfully petitioned a Babylonian court for his freedom, in what may be history's first recorded fugitive slave case.

It is because of another legal entanglement that we know about a second Lady Gaga—a certain Madame de Gaga, who crops up in London court records from 1839. The case of De Gaga v. The Duke of Leinster was a complicated affair, involving French dowry law and the purchase of a house on the Rue D'Anjou in Paris. Although the paper trail reveals little about Madame de Gaga, we can infer at least one similarity with the singer of "Poker Face." Like Stefani Germanotta, Madame de Gaga was a bootstrapper, a Gaga by choice: She was born Matilda Fitzgerald in County Kildare, Ireland, and attained her aristocratic title when she married the Chevalier de Gaga in 1817.
A century later, we come to a third Lady Gaga, who in several respects eerily anticipates the 2011 version. This Gaga showed up in the April 24, 1929 issue of Punch, the humor magazine that was devoted to skewering the follies of London society. Punch's Lady Gaga was fictional, the lead character in a satire that took aim at the so-called Bright Young People, a brigade of bohemians and socialites whose aggressively post-Victorian antics caught the spirit of London's Jazz Age.

For several years, into the 1930s, the Bright Young People captivated London's gossip columnists with a series of "freak" or "stunt" parties—themed soirees featuring elaborate costumes, cross-dressing, wild animals, and outlandish musical entertainment. Guests at the Second Childhood Party arrived at a posh Knightsbridge townhouse in oversized prams. For the Wild West Party, flappers traded in their Parisian frocks for chaps and boots. There was a Bottle and Pyjama Party (booze and sleepwear), a Bath and Bottle Party (booze, swimming pool), a Mozart Party (powdered wigs). At the Circus Party, held in July of 1929, the musical entertainment included a jazz orchestra and an accordion quartet. There was a dancing bear on hand, and a Siberian wolf, and a seal.

In the Punch satire, "The Dull Young People: A Study at a Stunt-Party," the unnamed narrator gains entry to an exclusive gathering hosted by "The Honorable Batsine Belfrage and her husband 'Bobo,' whose sobriquet has attained the dignity of recognition by all the smartest paragraphists of the dance-club Press." The narrator's escort is a blue-blooded party-girl with a slangy vocabulary ("Aren't they too ultra-super?") and a lust for publicity. Her name? "Lady Gaga."

"It was terribly difficult for me to get you a card," said Lady Gaga as she steered me dexterously in her pink two-seater through the mazes of after-theatre traffic; "but, my dear, I get away with it. I told them you wrote for the papers.

"You're still in the thirties," she went on severely, "yet you're so Victorian! And I'm determined you shall meet some of the Bright Young People."

The pair arrives at a small house in Bloomsbury packed with revelers and—to the delight of fame-hungry Gaga—the leading lights of the gossip press.

"Look!" whispered Gaga rapturously, "there's Bobby de Bootlace; he's 'Mask' of The Morning Headline. And there's Dodo d'Organdie; she's 'Flâneuse' of The Evening Eavesdropper. That's Bunloafe she's talking to; he does that priceless page every week in The Sunday Shocker! How glorious! They're sure to put us in!"

The party is a Dionysian romp, with guests who could be extras in the "Bad Romance" video. There's "a flabby fellow wearing a leopard's skin and a gold bracelet" who gives a dance performance "assisted by an immensely tall emaciated girl with her lips painted black." There's "an exquisite in exaggerated dress-clothes and a crash-helmet … introduced to me by Gaga as 'Toto.' " Everywhere, there are homosexuals:

Here was a cocktail-bar, from behind which "Bobo" in person, attired as a merchant skipper, dispensed refreshment to a perspiring mob of boys and girls in rather too elaborate fancy-dress, most of the latter showing a curiously unimaginative preference for trousers. On the counter sat a massive maiden in a cavalry officer's mess kit, whom everybody addressed as "Colonel," and next to her a fresh-faced lad dressed as a bride, complete with veil and orange blossom. He was just down, so Gaga informed me, from the University, but had already one distinction in the mostly brightly youthful circles as a dress-designer whose creations in satin pyjamas were "simply super"!

The story ends with Gaga stretched out on a floor strewn with cigarette butts, "her arm round the waist of a young heavy-weight in horn-rims, dressed as a baby. They were listening to a hollow-eyed girl in a ballet-skirt and a man's opera hat who was singing a mournful song with the refrain, 'It's terribly thrill-ing to be wicked.' "

Punch's Lady Gaga surfaced at least one more time, a couple of years later, in a small item in the magazine's Oct 14, 1931 issue. By this time, we gather, Lady Gaga has graduated from the London demimonde to international movie stardom. In a short dispatch bylined to "Lady Gaga Gate-Crasher, Lord Turnstile's daughter," she explains her decision to retire from the silver screen: "Shortly after my début on the talkies I was inundated with letters of congratulation from millions of my public. This sort of thing is always upsetting to a girl of temperament, so I cancelled a number of contracts with Ellstree and Hollywood and am going into seclusion for a while." The title of the piece: "Why I Have Entered A Convent."

Lady Gaga, a nun? Could happen.