Update: The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 8 Feb.

Here are some late braking stories to add to today's DFWC.

• A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act, according to The Guardian.
  
  

  "Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

• In more global warming news, AP reports while the northern Plains and Northeast shiver in dangerously cold temperatures, the folks in upstate New York are keeping warm shoveling snow -- lots of snow.
  
  Since Sunday, the small towns of Parish and Mexico have recorded more than 6 feet of snow, and forecasters with the National Weather Service say it isn't over yet.
  
  

  "We're just trying to keep up. It's almost an unreal amount," said Mayor Randy Bateman of Oswego, where 70 inches of snow had fallen by Thursday morning. "We catch up when it stops, but then it just comes again, even heavier."

• AFP reports the Democrat-led US Congress signalled it would take a cue from the landmark UN report on global warming and draft legislation aimed at fighting climate change.
  
  While seeming to turn a blind eye on the reality of confirmed threats against Western society, the narrow Democrat majority in congress would rather invest in a popularity contest pitting one theoretical prediction against another.
  
  A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" is being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before an audience of a global audience of 2bn, reports FT.com.
  
  Another AFP story reports an Arctic "doomsday vault" aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project's builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans.
  
  The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's crops.
  
  Lets hope the acquire the corn seeds before the price has been made astronomical due to shortages cause by government subsidies and the use of corn-based methanol fuels.

• Forty years after the Bloods and the Crips put Los Angeles on the map, the number of gangs in Los Angeles County has swelled to about 1,000 and their estimated 88,000 members are drawn from every ethnicity -- Asians, blacks, Latinos, whites, reports Reuters.
  
  

  "Los Angeles county and city is, unfortunately, the gang capital of America," Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said as police on Thursday announced a crackdown on the city's 11 worst gangs.

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