Creepy Disclosures Weblog- Archive#11

Islamic Republic of Great Britain? (UKobersver via Metafilter)
The heartland of violent Islamic extremism is now none of the official fronts of the war on terror. Its center is Western Europe -- mainly, but not exclusively, in Britain. "Al-Muhajiroun has one goal," Anjam Choudry, its U.K. chairman, told the Observer newspaper. "We would like to see the implementation of the sharia law in the U.K. Under our rule this country
would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain."

Atlantic Gas Rupture Could Trigger Tsunami Scenario (Cosmiverse)
May 31, 2000 08:42 CDT
A team of scientists investigating whether possible cracks along the outer continental shelf off the mid-Atlantic coast might lead to a tsunami-causing landslide has discovered that the entire area is charged with gas.
Based on preliminary results from a just-completed two-week cruise to the area funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the scientists say the suspected cracks are a system of large depressions along the shelf edge that appear to have been excavated by gas erupting through the seafloor.
"We don't know the source of the gas," team leader Neal Driscoll of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said. "But it is clear that gas has played an important role in the formation of these features. The gas is trapped under layers of sediment on the shelf edge until some circumstance causes it to escape, blowing holes in the seafloor to form these large pockmark features we thought were cracks."
"We were a bit taken aback, to be sure," said Jeffrey Weissel, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "A great deal more work is needed before any definitive statements can be made. Regardless of the source, it is apparent that gas charging plays a critical role in the area, and that the ongoing process of blowouts could conceivably weaken the shelf edge and contribute to a submarine landslide/."
In a paper published in the journal Geology days prior to their May 7 departure for the Mid-Atlantic coast, Driscoll, Weissel and John Goff of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, speculated that rising gas might play a part in triggering shelf-edge collapse. Even so, they were surprised at the quantity of gas and the apparent vigor of the "blowout" process.
"Our seismic data show that gas is pervasive in and around the blow-outs," Goff said. "Gas has a characteristic signal, which commonly shows up as a bright, high-amplitude reflection that obscures any deeper signals."
"These are exciting findings," said Mike Purdy, director of NSF's division of ocean sciences. "We now know that biological, chemical and physical processes, like those that created the gas reservoirs and gas expulsions described by these investigators, are going on every day in the depths of the sea."
The scientists say the features, some as large as 6,500 feet across, 165 feet deep and up to 16,400 feet long occur in a line along the shelf edge. That suggests there is some geological mechanism at work underneath the features, or their trend and shapes might be due to their proximity to the shelf edge. A submarine landslide and resulting tsunami along the shelf, although a very low risk when compared to the chance of hurricanes and severe storms striking the area, remains possible, said the scientists.

Man's farts were so foul that supermarket had to be evacuated (BostonGlobe via Fark)

The Mystery of the Dropas
May 15, 2000 08:11 CST
They're said to be a remote tribe, living in the Himalayan Mountains between China and Tibet--a race of extraterrestrial peoples that survive from legends of a spacecraft that crashed on Earth 12,000 years ago.
Known as the Dropa, the legend of this stranded alien species began in 1938, when high in the mountains of BayanKara-Ula on the borders of China and Tibet, a team of archaeologists led by professor Chi Pu Tei were conducting a survey of a series of interlocking caves.
There they found lines of neatly arranged graves, which contained the skeletons of human-like beings with small bodies and large, overdeveloped heads. Also in the caves were carved pictograms of the sun, moon, stars and Earth, with lines of dots connecting them all.
And while studying the skeletons one of the members of the team stumbled on a large round stone disc half buried in the dust on the floor of the cave. The disc looked like a Stone Age record, with a hole in the center of and a spiraling line of tiny, closely written characters, of unlikely similarity to modern phonograph records.
The disc was labeled and filed away among other finds in the area, and experts were unable to decipher its meaning for more than 20 years. In 1962, Dr. Tsum Um Nui broke the code and deciphered what he called the "speaking grooves".
The Peking academy of Pre-History forbade him to publish his findings, but two years later he wrote a paper entitled "The Grooved Script Concerning Spaceships Which, as Recorded on the Discs, Landed on Earth 12,000 Years Ago."
The Chinese scholar wrote that the stones told the story of a "space probe" flown by the inhabitants of another planet who came to the Baya-Kara-Ula mountain range. They had crash-landed, and had no means of repairing their ship and escaping from Earth.
Members of the Han tribe, he said, hunted them down and killed them, repulsed by their yellow skin and oversized heads. They referred to themselves as the Dropas, and said they descended from the clouds. More than 700 additional stones were found in the same caves in 1965.
In 1968, the Dropa stones came to the attention of a Russian scientist who conducted tests on the discs with odd results. When placed on a special turntable, he said, they vibrated or hummed in an unusual rhythm as though an electric charge was passing through them.
Tsum Um Nui's translation and his theories were met with ridicule by the archaeology establishment at the time, but there are reports that the ETs may yet survive in the mountainous area, where two tribes that call themselves the Hans and the Dropas inhabit the area of the caves.
The tribes are described as odd looking in appearance. They are frail and stunted in growth averaging only about 5 feet in height. They are neither typically Chinese nor Tibetan, with yellowish skin and large eyes with pale blue irises.
Like the Yeti, the Dropa are one of the ancient mysteries of the Himalayas.

Are they sure they are just lost albums from Jimmy Saville's record collection?

Long-Destroyed Fifth Planet May Have Caused Lunar Cataclysm, Researchers Say
(Space.com)
18 March 2002
HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things.
Space scientists John Chambers and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center hypothesize that along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- the terrestrial, rocky planets -- there was a fifth terrestrial world, likely just outside of Mars's orbit and before the inner asteroid belt.
Moreover, Planet V was a troublemaker.
The computer modeling findings of Chambers and Lissauer were presented during the 33rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held here March 11-15, and sponsored by NASA and the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
It is commonly believed that during the formative years of our solar system, between 3.8 billion and 4 billion years ago, the Moon and Earth took a pounding from space debris. However, there is an on-going debate as to whether or not the bruising impacts tailed off 3.8 billion year ago or if there was a sudden increase - a "spike" -- in the impact rate around 3.9 billion years ago, with quiet periods before and afterwards?
This epoch of time is tagged as the "lunar cataclysm" - also a wakeup call on the cosmological clock when the first evidence of life is believed to have appeared on Earth.
The great cover-up
Having a swarm of objects clobbering the Moon in a narrow point of time would have resurfaced most of our celestial next door neighbor, covering up its early history. Being that the Moon is so small, Earth would have been on the receiving end of any destructive deluge too.
Moon-walking astronauts brought back a cache of lunar material. Later analysis showed that virtually all impact rocks in the "Apollo collection" sported nearly the same age, 3.9 billion years, and none were older. But some scientists claim that these samples were "biased", as they came from a small area of the Moon, and are the result of a localized pummeling, not some lunar big bang.
There is a problem in having a "spike" in the lunar cratering rate.
That scenario is tough to devise. Things should have been settling down, according to solar system creation experts. Having chunks of stuff come zipping along some hundreds of millions of years later out of nowhere and create a lunar late heavy bombardment is a puzzler.
If real, what were these bodies, and where were they before they scuffed up the Moon big time? The answer, according to Chambers and Lissauer, might be tied to the the
Planet V hypothesis.
"The extra planet formed on a low-eccentricity orbit that was long-lived, but unstable," Chambers reported. About 3.9 billion years ago, Planet V was perturbed by gravitational interactions with the other inner planets. It was tossed onto a highly eccentric orbit that
crossed the inner asteroid belt, a reservoir of material much larger than it is today.
Planet V's close encounters with the inner belt of asteroids stirred up a large fraction of those bodies, scattering them about. The perturbed asteroids evolved into Mars crossing orbits, and temporarily enhanced the population of bodies on Earth-crossing orbits, and also increased the lunar impact rate.
After doing its destabilizing deeds, Planet V was lost too, most likely spinning into the Sun, the NASA team reported.
The temporary existence of more than 4 planet-sized bodies in the inner Solar System is consistent with the currently favored model for the formation of the Moon. Work by Chambers and Lissauer also supports the view that our Moon is a leftover of a massive collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body 50 million to 100 million years after the formation of the Solar System.

Nemesis: The Theory of the Sun's 'Evil' Brown Dwarf Twin (SPACE.com)
22 March 2001
"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance. It's know'n so many things that ain't so." -- A favorite quote of Richard A. Muller, by 19th century humorist Josh Billings.
When you think big, as Richard A. Muller does, you're bound to create ideas now and then that are so compelling you just can't let go of them -- ideas so outlandish that mainstream scientists are equally eager to dismiss them.
Muller, a physicist at University of California at Berkeley, has had his share of big ideas.
If you don't count the restaurant he owned between 1976 and 1982 ("If anyone near and dear to you wants to open a restaurant, I can now be hired to talk them out of it."), Muller's ideas are generally rooted in solid science and genius extrapolation. He's got a gaggle of prestigious awards to prove it, with titles that say things like "outstanding" and "highly original."
But Muller's biggest idea is a real Nemesis. Or so he claims.
Like a thorn in the side of mainstream researchers, Muller's Nemesis theory -- that our Sun has a companion star responsible for recurring episodes of wholesale death and destruction here on Earth -- seems to reemerge periodically like microbes after a mass extinction.
It's a theory that has many detractors. And it's a theory that has been beaten down and left for dead in the minds of most scientists.
Yet it is a theory that just won't die.
Nemesis is cautiously supported by a handful of scientists, who often sound like ringside rooters eager for a victory but thankful they don't have to put the gloves on. Muller meanwhile acknowledges the possibility that the whole idea could turn out to be wrong, but he is nonetheless confident that Nemesis will be found within 10 years.
"Give me a million dollars and I'll find it," Muller said in a recent telephone interview.
Brave words for a bold theory that if proven true would shake up everything we know about the formation and evolution of our solar system.
Genesis of Nemesis
Muller's idea for Nemesis came to him 1983. Luis Alvarez, then an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and his son Walter had recently put forth the theory that a giant impact had wiped out the dinosaurs. (This idea, like so many others that are now widely accepted, met with staunch criticism when it was introduced because it, too, was not mainstream).
Around the same time, two other researchers had suggested yet another controversial idea, that mass extinctions occurred at regular intervals -- every 26 million years or so. Scientists immediately folded the ideas into a new and breathtaking possibility: Impacts by space rocks were causing massive global species destruction every 26 million years.
Luis Alvarez was Richard Muller's mentor, and he suggested that Muller try to debunk the periodicity argument. Pondering this, Muller dreamed up the fanciful companion to the Sun as a possible cause, and with Berkeley's Piet Hut and Marc Davis of Princeton, worked out the details.
Muller gave the object the name of the Greek goddess of retribution -- fitting for a killer star that roamed stealthily beyond the solar system flicking comets at dinosaurs.
In the end, the idea looked surprisingly plausible to Muller and his colleagues, and the results of their work were ultimately published in the journal Nature in 1984. Muller then wrote a book about Nemesis, and he has pursued the companion star, while also doing other research, ever since.
Tossing comets at us
Nemesis, as Muller sees it, is a common red dwarf star that would be visible through binoculars or a small telescope, if only we knew which of some 3,000 stars to look at. These are stars that have been cataloged, but their distances are not known.
Any one of them could be the Death Star, as Nemesis has come to be called by some.
Red dwarfs are the most common stars in the galaxy. They are small and relatively cool, dimmer than our Sun. The notion of companion stars is also exceedingly common -- more than half of all stars are part of such a binary system, in which two stars are thought to form out of a single cloud of gas and dust.
Binary stars settle into a gravitational dance around a common point in space. The smaller of the two stars does most of the orbiting, whereas the larger one is much closer to the center of the dance routine. It's like two kids on a seesaw. For the thing to work properly, the heavier child must sit closer to the center of the apparatus.
Muller figures Nemesis' orbit ranges from 1 to 3 light-years away from the Sun.
On its closest approach, the lethal companion would pass through a vast, but sparsely populated halo of primitive comets called the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system from beyond Neptune's orbit out to nearly a light-year away. (The Sun's nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years away).
During this passage through or near the Oort Cloud, the gravity of Nemesis would scatter a furious storm of primordial comets that had been relatively undisturbed for 4.5 billion years, since the solar system came into being.
Dislodged from their once-stable orbits, millions or billions of these comets would travel to the inner solar system over millions of years, pulled toward the Sun by its gravity. A handful would run into Earth along the way, and the flurry of would result in mass extinctions.
Simple enough. But Nemesis has for years been dogged by a misunderstanding, Muller says. Most researchers think the theory was long ago dismissed by competing data that claimed its orbit was not possible.
The orbit assumed for Nemesis is an unusual one, Muller admits. No star has ever been found to orbit so far from a companion. "And that really bothers people," he said. "It makes them think that this is a really far-out idea, literally."
But computer models developed by Muller and his colleagues predict that such an orbit must occur at some point in the evolution of most binary star systems. "We just haven't found such systems yet," he said.
And while Muller appreciates the natural and healthy skepticism of other scientists, he figures they are not interested in funding a search because they erroneously assume that Nemesis cannot be found.
Jonathan Tate is the director of Spaceguard U.K., which lobbies for a government response to the threat of asteroids. Tate is among those who see no rush to find Nemesis. He would rather see money spent on more immediate searches for asteroids closer to Earth that might prove to be humanity's undoing in coming decades or centuries.
As Tate points out, proving that mass extinctions occur every 26 million years, regardless of the cause, is only of academic interest: Humans may not likely to be around to care, as many researchers don't expect our species to last that long. If we do survive, there will likely be plenty of time to worry.
Questioning periodicity
Meanwhile, many scientists see little or no credibility to the studies alleging periodicity in mass extinctions, and hence no need for a Nemesis theory.
Numerous studies have reported cycles in either impacts or mass extinctions. The period between peaks in these studies mostly range from 26 million to 35 million years. Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University says that trying to pin down things that happened so long ago is no simple challenge. For one thing, space rocks that land in the ocean leave few clues, Glikson points out, and Earth is roughly two-thirds water.
And Earth has always had a crust that is on the move. Evidence gets buried, destroyed, and folded into oblivion by the same process that creates mountains and moves continents.
"Some of the suggested periodicities are more likely to represent statistical artifacts than robust observations," Glikson said.
David Raup, a University of Chicago paleontologist, made the original mass-extinction periodicity argument two decades ago along with colleague J. John Sepkoski. The pair studied marine fossil records over a 250 million-year period that they say showed significant spikes every 26 million years.
"To me, the periodicity idea is as well supported as many ideas that have been adopted into the conventional wisdom, but the scientific community is heartily skeptical," Raup told SPACE.com. "Of the 15 or so re-analyses of our data published since the original paper, about half support periodicity and half reject it. It's is still very much in the eye of the beholder."
Muller supports the statistics more emphatically.
"There is a peculiar pattern in mass extinctions, something that cannot be dismissed as a statistical fluctuation," Muller said. "It requires some explanation."
Raup, now retired from active research, would not venture a guess as to when or whether Nemesis might be found, but he expressed hope in the idea: "I am glad Rich [Muller] is still working on it because it may take a lot of effort, and he's the best."
The galactic plane, Planet X and black holes
Other ideas have been put forth to explain the alleged periodicity in mass extinctions.
The most widely accepted is the suggestion that the solar system, as it revolves around the center of the Milky Way, bobs up and down through the plane of the galaxy. This plane is full of gas and dust that never became stars, which collectively has a certain amount of gravity that some expect might dislodge comets from the Oort Cloud.
There are doubts, however, about the amount of mass in the galactic plane and whether or not the timing coincides with the periodicity of mass extinctions.
Others have suggested a dim failed star known as a brown dwarf might be lurking in the distant fringes of the solar system. Muller called the increasing rate of discovery of brown dwarfs, including one that is just 13 light-years away, "extremely discouraging." For if Nemesis were a brown dwarf, it would be harder to find.
Yet another enduring idea is that another large planet lurks beyond Pluto. This so-called Planet X would be a gas ball up to five times the size of Earth, according to some predictions. Even the possibility of a black hole has been raised. Few researchers support these two ideas.
Evidence from the Moon
The best evidence for periodic impacts on Earth may ultimately come from the Moon. While the Earth's crust has been stretched, squashed and folded violently its whole life, the Moon is relatively static, preserving a far more accessible geologic record.
A year ago Muller, Berkeley geologist Paul Renne and then-graduate student Timothy Culler found the Moon underwent a flurry of impacts between 400 million and 600 million years ago. The active period (which may still be going on) presumably affected Earth as well since both bodies are in roughly the same spot in the solar system.
Muller says the sudden increase offers indirect evidence for a sudden change in the orbit of Nemesis, which might have been caused by a passing star.
But the study did not turn up evidence for the 26 million-year periodicity, as hoped. Muller says there was not enough data. The study involved 155 microscopic glass beads formed in the intense heat of lunar impacts and later brought to Earth, in a single gram of soil, by the Apollo 14 crew.
But given that there are "several hundred pounds (kilograms) of [lunar] dust and rocks that have not been analyzed," Muller plans another more detailed study.
Whether or not he finds evidence for Nemesis in Moon dust, it's clear that Muller won't stop looking. He is a man of enduring confidence. But he is also a remarkably conservative scientist, quick as anyone to point out that there is no proof until there is proof.
"I'm realistic," he said. "I may be wrong."
And he recognizes that if the Death Star is not found, the whole idea could become a real Nemesis for the big thinker who dreamed it up.

Mysteries of the World Theme Park-Close encounters in the home land of Erich von Däniken
June 1st, 1998

The "Chariots of the Gods" of Erich von Däniken, are becoming real! The mysteries of planet Earth, the world we came from. Lines, called "pistas," up to 23 kilometers long in the desert of Nazca, Peru, columns of huge Menhirs at Carnac, France ... "Images for the gods" and stones of the Giants are telling stories of a fantastic, unknown past.
The future has already caught this past. For decades we have noticed that conservative theories of science are becoming weak and instable. Could it be that extraterrestrial visitors, revered as gods, left traces behind?
Erich von Däniken, bestseller author and fighter for a serious "Paleo-SETI*-Research" is collecting these mysteries of the world in one place. In a three-dimensional way, touchable, experienceable for everyone! To reach this target it is planned to build up a great experience and education park until the year 2002 on an area about 60,000 square metres in area at Interlaken, in the famous region of the Berner Oberland. In "Mysteries of the World" the visitors will come in close contact with mysterious graves of the Pharaoh's, with realistic catacombs of the Maya priests in which they have to go downstairs. Visitors can bring reconstructed chariots of the gods to flight, the so called Vimanas, and with high tech and virtual reality it will be possible to hover over the Nazca pampa and visitors even will be able to beam laser messages to the stars.
The Erich von Däniken experience world will present sensations, like the complete documentation of the discovery of the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink of a 68 metre long channel with a sealed small door within the Cheops-Pyramid. It will be a park which will generate a popular-science discussion, which will open "cross links in mind" and will transfer the message to the public and into the class rooms. "We are not alone in the cosmos" - a statement which fascinates. "Mysteries of the World" will not be an anti-scientific stage, will exclude unsure UFO topics and will be free of any esoteric speculations.
Amongst others, the two "special effects experts" Stefan Züricher, movie producer from Wengen, experienced from many James Bond movies, and Dominic Lavery, cencept-illustrator from London, care for the spectacular realization of the ideas of Erich von Däniken.
Work on the buildings will start in 1999. Everyone who is interested in the project is welcomed to support it with donations or other contributions. The whole project is carried by the state controlled foundation
The thing is if the ancients did have flying cars and nukes and lasers and so forth, then did they not have TV? If so where are the programs?

Meet The Mysteries Of This World
How Erich von Däniken's Mystery Park Was Born
Oktober 19, 2001
"It will not be a UFO park". Initiator Erich von Däniken has had to repeat these words over and over again. But now, even the last sceptics can allow themselves to be convinced. The contours of the Mystery Park, Interlaken's unique adventure and educational theme park are clearly visible, whether on a virtual visit to the home page at www.mysterypark.ch or an actual visit to the construction site itself. After a planning and building period of only five years, the park will open its gates on 7 November 2002.
Mysteries are found all over the globe, created by our ancestors and with their secrets still unsolved to this day. These witnesses to past cultures are often situated in remote locations, completely inaccessible to most people. However, books, illustrations or films have made them familiar to everyone. A vast amount of research has been carried out and theories expounded, yet to this day, there is still no satisfactory explanation. Even the age of several of these mysteries remains shrouded in secrecy.
The mystery of Nazca lies about 450 km south of Lima, in Peru, consisting of kilometres of dead straight lines similar to runways, each up to 1.60 km long and 70 m wide and giant drawings etched into the earth. To date, every attempt to explain their creation and purpose has been refuted. The Pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt provide another mystery, with even their age still a matter of dispute. Ancient Indian literature contains detailed descriptions of flying vehicles or Vimanas. Similar vehicles are also mentioned in the Old Testament and Ethiopian folklore, a mystery which remains unsolved to the present day.
Millions of fascinated fans
No one person has fascinated people with descriptions of these mysteries more than best-selling author Erich von Däniken. His books have been translated into 32 languages with over 60 million copies sold. A total of eight million viewers watched both screenings of the "Erich von Däniken-Special" on the RTL television channel. And soon, the work of this best-selling author will be filmed as a series in Hollywood, by the producers of the "X Files".
In the Mystery Park, Erich von Däniken is bringing the great mysteries of the world together in one truly unique location. The extraordinary adventure and educational theme part is being created in Interlaken, perfectly situated in Interlaken, at the heart of Europe and an internationally renowned tourist resort. A wide public will be able to pay a virtual visit to the sites of the mysteries, to travel back through time to the roots of our different cultures and make new discoveries or decide on their own explanations. Erich von Däniken is certain that these mysteries form one of the largest untapped fields of exploration which remain open to the youth of today and following generations.
Inexhaustible archives
In autumn 1997 Erich von Däniken brought the foundation "The Great Mysteries of the World" to life in Interlaken, close to his home village of Beatenberg. In addition to ready cash, he also donated part of his vast collection of manuscripts, slides, films, books and research studies to the publicly controlled foundation. On his death, the remainder of his life's work will also pass to the foundation. This provides an invaluable source of knowledge for the Mystery Park as indeed do relationships with similar associations, for example the "Archeology, Astronautics and SETI Research Association (A.A.S)".
The Mystery Park AG was set up as a limited company to realise the project, with Interlaken businessman Oskar Schärz as chairman of the board of directors. The scheme rapidly gained a wide following far beyond Switzerland. The shares are listed on the stock exchanges in Bern and Berlin and it is estimated that to date over 7000 investors have bought shares, and so joint owners of the park. At present, over CHF 33 million own capital is available for the realisation of the project.

International business concerns as sponsors
But well-known investors and sponsors have also shown great enthusiasm for this innovative project. Feldschlösschen, Valora, Sennheiser, Sony, Hotela, Coca-Cola, SBB, Bleuel Electronic, HP and Industriellen Betriebe Interlaken (IBI) have all been gained as partners. Sponsors' pledges amount to around CHF 8 million. More than half the CHF 80 million investment cost (excluding F+B sector) has thus been financed.
Construction began on the 100,000 sq.m. site of the former military airfield in Matten on 1 March 2001. Environmental and nature conservation associations from the region have been drawn in, to ensure that the park will be built and operated in an as environmentally-friendly manner as possible. For example, thanks to the direct supply of cooling energy from ground water, the amount of electricity needed to cool the buildings will be reduced by over 95%! Building permission procedures were processed in just six months, with only a few objections. Definitive building permission was granted on 15 August 2001.
No dead museum
Parallel to the construction work, various project teams are busy creating the themes to be presented in the seven buildings which are set out in the shape of a star. Autumn 2000 saw the first filming of the straight kilometre-long lines at Nazca in Peru. This material will one day soon give visitors to the Mystery Park the incredible illusion of flying over the deserts and mountains of the Peruvian Andes.
Erich von D?niken depicts another theme building thus, "I had hardly realised that the jungle path was climbing slightly when I found myself before the arched entrance to some steps. "The Temple of the Inscription in Palenque, Mexico". Bathed in the gloomy, rusty-red light from the artificial flares in the walls, I went down the few steps into the vault. The walls were bare, with a damp shimmer. Broken stalactites clung to the ceiling."
The words "We don't want to build a dead museum" are very important to Erich von Däniken. Using state-of-the-art multimedia means, the various hypotheses will be placed side by side and the visitor actively drawn into events. Children will have fun in a Play Garden. Fun Shuttles will simulate a Mars landing. Computer fans will be able to surf the world of mysteries in the PC Drome. Thanks to lightweight construction, it will be possible to update the theme pavilions with topical themes after a few years. The park will remain "alive" and able to continually present new themes.
150 new jobs in the Bernese Oberland
In the centre of the park, in addition to the restaurants and shopping area, will stand a globe tower housing the Science Centre. The Mystery Park is already working in close cooperation with educational and research institutions and has the support of the State Secretariat for the Economy.
The park will open on 7 November 2002, at the end of Expo. 02. with the Science Centre opening a year later. Around 500,000 visitors are expected annually. As the Mystery Park will be an all-year-round operation, it will also provide the region's guests with a welcome touristic attraction in bad weather. Countless enquiries and even group and company reservations (incentives) for events in the Mystery Park have already been received from both inside and outside Switzerland.
The Mystery Park will create approximately 80 jobs for full-time employees and apprentices together with about 70 jobs in the secondary service sector. "Erich von Däniken's idea does not therefore just portray a vision. It will also provide a genuine economic boost for the whole of the Bernese Oberland", emphasises Elisabeth Zölch, Head of the Department for Public Economy, Berne, and Member of the Cantonal Executive

Are Crop Circles Caused by Solar Radiation?

Reality Creation For The Ignorant-Ancient Palestine is a myth
(By Pro-Israel, Anti-Sharon, Anti-NWO, Rabin-assassination conspiracy Mongerer Barry Chamish)
3-20-2
On September 30, 2000, a twelve year old Gazan boy named Muhammed ad-Dura was shot while huddled against a wall with his father, trapped in a firefight between the PLO and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The shooting was filmed by French TV and the PLO exploited the incident to fuel a bloody terror war against Israel, turning the boy into an international martyr through the foreign media.
Numerous responsible Israelis such as Yaacov Verker and Yosef Doriel approached this same media with conclusive evidence that the IDF could not have shot the boy. The film proved that Muhammed ad-Dura was shot from in front and above. The IDF troops were behind him and at his side. That meant that the PLO, in an incredibly ugly act of cynicism, shot the boy and milked him for all that he was worth. And maybe even more: Yaacov Verker's research led him to the conclusion that ad-Dura survived the shooting.
For 18 months, the world media refused to accept that the PLO shot the boy, to the point that when the IDF's own investigatory team reached the same conclusion, it was subjected to derision. This week, finally, one lone producer from German TV, Esther Shapira, broadcast the filmed proof that the IDF were not in position to have done the shooting.
It was a rare instance of media truth about Israel and just watch it get ignored everywhere. The innocent boy will continue to be a victim of Israeli cruelty no matter what the the truth because the major world media are serving their political bosses' agenda of destroying Israel by pumping up the anti-semitism, especially in Europe, to pre-Holocaust levels. There is nothing accidental or random about the twisted news angles from Israel and we're going to prove it by what the media is NOT reporting.
However, before we take a look at the international media, let's see how bad things are in Israel. Turn on your sets to Channel One's 7:30 news report and you get to see a map of Israel minus Yesha. Yup, the good folks who run the government-owned station, those selfsame visionaries who brought us the joys of the Oslo peace, have removed those contentious territories from the map, along with, presumably, the quarter million Israelis who live in them.
Then, as one informant tells me, there is the issue of censorship at the communal farmsteads. The Labor Party-affiliated publishing house, Kibbutz Hameuhad published an edition of Joan Peters' book, From Time Immemorial. This is the book the PLO has had banned wherever it had the persuasive power to do so, because it proves that there is no ancient Palestinian people.
Peters' confirms what every travel writer of the 19th century saw: the Turkish province where Israel sits today, was nearly depopulated and in the few urban centers that existed, such as Jerusalem, Tsfat and Tiberius, Jews were the majority. She backs the travel writers with detailed censuses undertaken by the Turks and British. Central to her thesis that the ancient Palestinian people is a myth, is the huge jump in the population of the Arabs after the British arrived. Arabs from as far away as Iraq were being encouraged by the British to settle in the Palestinian colony they had occupied. Most of today's Palestinians have lived in the land they claim as their own, for no more than eighty years.
At the same time as the British were luring distant Arabs to the land, mostly by economic opportunities, they approved the establishment of a Jewish state on the same land. Just as they had done in Africa and on the Indian sub-continent, the British were deliberately creating future chaos, all the better to control once their forces had gone home.
My informant relates, "I wanted a copy of the Hebrew edition of Peters' book and called every bookstore in Tel Aviv. They were taken off the shelves. So I phoned the publisher, Kibbutz Meuhad to order a copy. I was told not a copy of the book was left in their inventory and they would never publish it again, no matter how many people ordered it. I asked why and was told the book harms the peace process."
Indeed it would, if the goal is to create a distorted reality of events. But everyone is doing it. Two weeks ago a bomb killed 12 people in a Jerusalem restaurant and the BBC chose to cover the atrocity with a report on Israeli occupation in Gaza. Irrelevant coverage is just as good as no coverage at all.
Still, no coverage is the prime means of distortion. Let's have a look at some of the stories that somehow, are deemed unnewsworthy.
Who Needs Christians Anyway?
In 1992, 40,000 Christians lived in Bethlehem, and they had a considerable presence in Jericho and Jerusalem. Today, they're all but gone, maybe 8,000 remain in Bethlehem and just hundreds in Jericho. Some found refuge in supposedly Israeli-controlled Jerusalem but the long arm of the PLO is driving them out of there almost as quickly. The Christians were terrorized, threatened, molested, robbed, raped, beaten and murdered until they got the hint that they were unwanted in PLO-land.
But why report this trivial story?
Business, We Don't Need No Filthy Business!
In 1992, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza had a thriving commerce and as good a local economy as is found in the Middle East. No more, because the PLO thugs, and those of the "radical elements" strongarmed the proprietors out of business. If you own a store or factory in PLO-land, you pay protection money or else!
With their businesses in tatters, and nothing left to lose, a significant number of such proprietors have moved their families to Israel, fearing what will become of them when the extortion capital has run out.
But who cares about greedy capitalists anyway?
We're Not Talking To That Troublemaker
A few weeks ago, a bomb went off next to a highschool in the Arab village of Sur Bahr, wounding 13 students. CNN was the first to report that it was the work of "Jewish extremists," and that's the line that was spread worldwide. But all that was needed was the most cursory of background reporting to set the record straight.
You see, Sur Bahr is the only Arab village to have openly declared that it doesn't relish the idea of being taken over by the PLO. Life is better without the PLO mucking things up. Needless to say, the PLO felt hurt by the rejection and pumped two bullets into the village mayor Zuhair Hamdam. The prime and only suspect in the bombing was the PLO, not an imaginary group of "Jewish extremists" who have not been heard from since.
However, reporting about an Arab Village which thinks the PLO isn't keen, is bad for the peace business. It's much prettier to spend airtime on hopeless experiments in reconciliation between the Jewish radical left and handpicked Arabs.
The Rabin Assassination
I can personally attest that there are lots of local and foreign media in Israel who know Yigal Amir was the patsy in the Rabin assassination. I know of one local social reporter who is convinced Shimon Peres organized the murder, but gives him glowing press for their common cause. Even the president of the Foreign Press Association here has asked me to fax documentation and has told me she suspected a conspiracy from the night of the murder.
Here's a typical incident. David Chater of Sky News interviewed me at my home for two hours. He understood the evidence just fine but when his report was aired, my portion had been edited out. I asked why and was told the decision was made in London. Instead of exploding the scandal, Chater ended up reporting that unfounded rumors of foul play found advocates in Israel. Only those condemning the "rumors" made it to the small screen.
I could name ten Israeli reporters who wrote fair articles about my work, only not to see it appear in print or on film. I can name one who told me he was warned that his career would be over if he ever reported on the Rabin murder again.
You see, it's much better for peace if Rabin was murdered by a Jewish extremist and not by the peace-loving Foreign Minister.
Now that we've proven unethical, selective or downright deceitful reporting, one must ask why do the reporters do it? An anecdote: A number of years ago, the Cuban-born Jerusalem bureau chief of the Miami Herald called me, saying he was looking for an assistant. I went to his office and before even getting acquainted, he asked me, "Who do you vote for?" I answered, "The Likud." He replied, "I'm sorry, I can't use you. Flabbergasted I said, "Do you know it's illegal to discriminate like that?" His cool retort was, "Not here it's not."
Touche.
I've met enough of the "journalists" to generalize: they're not very bright and they were chosen for their assignments because of their politics and lack of ethics. They are serving the hidden masters of this planet, and I won't pull out my Council On Foreign Relations members list right now to prove it. But the chairmen of NBC, CNN, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, Newsweek et al are all members of the CFR. And they are kind to Israel compared to the creepy characters working for the Bilderberg-controlled European media.
Now here's how you aid and abet the mini-Holocaust taking place in Israel today and prepare world opinion for more extermination of Jews: you distort reality.
You're Occupying Their Territory
Since 99% of "Palestinians" now share the subtle joy of being ruled by their own, Israel can't be accused of occupying the Palestinian people. So the big, big justification for murdering Israelis is that they're occupying their territory.
Now who says it's their territory? Barbara Walters for one. She told a colleague of mine that it's a given in the media that Yesha is Palestinian land and there is no hope of ever reverting the concept.
Not as long as the truth isn't being told. What truth is that? That there never was a Palestinian state or people. That both are mid-twentieth century inventions. That from 1948, 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands with all their assets confiscated, That the 500,000 Arabs who left Israel at the same time could have been compensated from the stolen Jewish assets. That Israel settled its refugees and the Arabs left theirs in squalour. That the whole conflict could have been settled back then with a, 'you take in your refugees, we'll take in ours,' deal.
Judea and Samaria not Jewish? Well then, the PLO had better change the Hebrew names of their towns. Hebron in Hebrew means Little Friend; Ramallah, Great Heights; Jericho; Moon Town; Bethlehem, Bakery.
And why should the media mention that before being massacred by the Arabs in the 1920s, a Jewish community had existed in Hebron from King David's time? Or that a string of Jewish villages existed from Jerusalem to Hebron before they were razed by the Arabs in 1948? Or that not one Arab village existed in the Jordan Valley from Jericho to Bet Shean before the Israelis settled there and made the land worthwhile enough for "Palestinians" to claim today that somehow they have a right to it.
Then there is the fact that not only did the British settle Arabs from throughout the Middle East in their Palestine, but after 1948, Egypt shifted thousands of its people to the Gaza Strip to maintain control. Gazans and West Bankers are not one happy family because a good chunk of the Gazans are, in fact, Egyptian.
All those unpleasant historical facts, must never be hinted at; after all, they could harm the war process.
There Is Cycle Of Violence In The Middle East
Now here is what's really going on. The PLO and associated gangs take great pains to murder civilians, the younger the better. The Israeli army takes great pains to kill those shooting at its civilians. If Israel kills a non-combatant, it's an accident. If the PLO kills a soldier, odds are he's out of uniform sipping coffee at a cafe, or, an accident.
Now how come the great institution of the free press doesn't ask, what kind of a people sends its teenagers out to blow themselves up? Because the answer is, a monstrous people. Back in the 30s, the media reported on the achievements of Nazi Germany in terms not unlike those used to describe the "Palestinian" enterprise. When asked to cuddle monsters, they end up fondling them for their masters.
And this kind of raw lying, hiding, twisting and distorting won't end because Saudi Arabia owns controlling shares of UPI and a sizable piece of CNN. The Saudi leadership, long ago appointed by British and American oil companies, walk hand in hand with their buddies from the CFR and Royal Institute Of International Affairs.
And why shouldn't they? Without Israel as the whipping boy, Arabs might begin to question their own repressive leaders, religion and culture.
Which, of course, is the true road to peace. If the Arabs ever wake up to how they've been impoverished in every way by the outsiders who control their leaders, they might begin to see reality, instead of the distorted picture shown in the media, which is keeping them ignorant and turning them barbaric.
If the Arabs don't snap out of it, then they should know: after Israel, them.

Mar 21st 2002: Ancient Babylonian New Year.

Little Walking Sony Man Can Recognise and talk to up to 10 people

Did Secret CIA Anthrax Mailing 'Test' Go Terribly Wrong? (Newsnight-BBCNews.co.uk)
3-18-2
A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.

The shocking assertion is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax which killed five people.

In the wake of Sept 11th, the anthrax attacks caused panic throughout the States and around the world. But has the FBI found the whole case too hot to handle? Our science editor Susan Watts reported from Washington.

SUSAN WATTS: America's anthrax attack last autumn was second only to that on the Twin Towers in the degree of shock and anxiety it caused...Some even say the anthrax letters triggered sub-clinical hysteria in the American people...yet this, the first major act of biological terrorism the world has seen remains an unsolved crime...

Initially the investigation looked for a possible Al-Qaeda or Iraqi link, then to a domestic terrorist, then inwards to the US bio-defence programme itself. But in the last four or five weeks the investigation seems to have run into the sand...There have been several theories as to why ...

Three weeks ago Dr Barbara Rosenberg - an acknowledged authority on US bio-defence - claimed the FBI is dragging its feet because an arrest would be embarrassing to the US authorities. Tonight on Newsnight, she goes further...suggesting there could have been a secret CIA field project to test the practicalities of sending anthrax through the mail - whose top scientist went badly off the rails...

DR BARBARA ROSENBERG: FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS: Some very expert field person would have been given this job and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out. The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes and target the media and the senate for his own motives as not intended by the govt project...but this is a possibility that I think needs to be considered

WATTS: And another leading bio-defence analyst has already sketched out a similar profile for the kind of person likely to be behind the anthrax attacks...

MILTON LEITENBERG: CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL & SECURITY STUDIES: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: I would think it was somebody who had this kind of experience, and I think the word that I used for you was 'a cowboy' when we first spoke, that simply means in the United States someone who feels such bravura in his actions, he feels he's a free actor, he can decide what should be done and what shouldn't be done, and what the reason is.

WATTS: In recent weeks, the focus of the investigation has been the US army medical research institute at Fort Detrick near Washington. Fort Detrick is the site at the centre of a web of military centres spread across the US and twilight private companies which work with these military sites hand-in-hand as contractors...

Colonel David Franz was in charge at Fort Detrick for eleven years - he's had hands-on experience with biological agents and has his own ideas about the kind of person the FBI should be looking for.

COLONEL DAVID FRANZ: FORMER DETRICK MEDICAL RESEARCH PROG, 1987-98: It's not someone who just got on the Internet or went to the library and got a book and held the book in one hand and a big wooden spoon in the other and stirred up batches. It's someone who has spent a significant amount of time I believe working with a spore former of some kind and knew how to grow ...and how to purify and how to dry

WATTS: Inside accounts by former staff at Fort Detrick during the nineties reveal a research site in disarray with questionable security measures. We spoke to one former lab technician now working in Belize about unexplained night-time activities in the lab.

DR MARY BETH DOWNS: ST MATTHEW'S UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: FORMER FORT DETRICK EMPLOYEE: I came in developed my negatives and here they said anthrax and I looked at this little counter that would have been putting the sequential numbers on the film and there weren't any films missing and yet I knew that Friday I had used it and it hadn't said anthrax.

WATTS: What did that suggest to you had been happening over the weekend?

DOWNS: That someone had been in there working on anthrax....Anyone who did have access to the labs was not monitored in what they did, either in what they did in the lab that is the amount of agent they were growing, or in what they did with that agent, that is if they put it in their pocket and took it home ...

WATTS: Such is the FBI's determination to establish if Fort Detrick is at the heart of this that it has turned to genomic analysis of the powder itself...The Inst for Genomic Research was founded by Craig Venter - the man who sped up the decoding of the Human Genome... their anthrax team has created a DNA "fingerprint" of anthrax taken from the body of the first person to be killed - a Florida-based newspaper man. They're looking for differences between this so-called Florida "strain" and stored samples from a number of US military sites

This is the first time genomic analysis has been used for microbial forensics...Tim Read is one of the world's leading authorities on the genetic make-up of anthrax . He compared the fingerprint of the Florida strain with that of samples originating at Fort Detrick. The results are not yet published - so he's being careful what he says:

DR TIMOTHY READ: THE INSTITUTE OF GENOMIC RESEARCH: They're definitely related to each other ...closely related to each other

WATTS: Could they be so closely related that one could consider them to be one and the same thing?

READ: I'm not commenting on that...

WATTS: But the real answer may lie not just in where the anthrax came from, but who had access to it. Veterans of the 1960s US germ warfare programme were the obvious first thought. Early on in the investigation, there was one name that immediately came to many people, but few dared whisper it aloud. William Capers Patrick the third was part of the original US programme, which officially drew to a close in the 1960s...The New York Times claimed last December he was the author in 1998 of a secret paper study on the possible effects of anthrax sent through the mail, although he now denies that. ...

We went to see Bill Patrick to ask him if he might know the culprit...

Hello Susan Watts BBC

Patrick is an acknowledged showman...known for his startling demonstrations ...some in less than classified company. During the course of our interview he told us several pieces of technical information which one expert said could help anyone intending to create an anthrax weapon.

WILLIAM CAPERS PATRICK III: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE CONSULTANT: I've prepared two harmless simulant powders... beautiful flow properties...

WATTS: It's clear from what Bill Patrick told us that he's been a central figure in the bio-defence community for many years and that he may well have met or come across the person behind the attacks...

PATRICK: Most of my discussions about the biological problem has been in secure conferences and meetings, and involve people with need to know, with security clearance and what have you. I don't talk about 'how to', I don't get into 'how to' with many people, no people other than the fact that those who really have a need to know.

WATTS: Does it nag at you in the back of your mind that possibly you do know him?

PATRICK: Possibly, possibly, I could have talked to these people. But it would have been within the context of their having a need to know.

WATTS: He told me two FBI agents and an official from the attorney general's office interviewed him for 3 and a half hours two weeks ago. He says they told him he had been a suspect, but left him believing he was in the clear.

And just to put on record can I ask you did you perpetrate these attacks..

PATRICK: my goodness I did not ....I did not...I'm an American patriot.

WATTS: Patrick was on the UN team that inspected Iraqi weapons facilities in the mid 1990s, and he WAS surprised the FBI didn't come to him straight after the attacks, simply because of his expertise. He acknowledges it was only logical to consider him a suspect, but for Patrick, the most likely explanation, or perhaps the most comfortable, is that the powder and the motive originated overseas - in some rogue state...

PATRICK: I would hate to think that anyone in our country.. that would do this to our own people, if we ever find whoever does this I hope it comes from overseas, because that way I would.. well I don't want.. I want someone to be caught, I want the perpetrator to be caught, but I would rather think that it came from our enemies outside of our own country as opposed to our own people perpetrating this crime against our own

WATTS: Bill Patrick is no longer seen as a suspect, but the net IS closing around someone at the heart of the US germ warfare programme.

We now know by piecing together information from well-placed sources that there's another individual. He's been interviewed by FBI agents, and remains under widespread suspicion...

But he's no loner. He's likely to have worked on a key government project in the past and to have a network of friends and colleagues he can rely on. The possibility that more than one person is involved may answer some of the perplexing geographical questions about where the attacks originated.

DR RONALD ATLAS: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MICROBIOLOGISTS: I think that the significance of focussing on a group is that you can have one person with the expertise to produce this weaponised anthrax and someone else to actually deliver it to Trenton. I think that a large part of the investigation early on focused on AN individual. As such we would ask the question, could that individual have gotten to New Jersey. If you begin to think that it could have involved two or more, then the alibi of an individual that I was not near New Jersey may in fact fall apart and you could look at someone else delivering it...

WATTS: The private contractor companies linked to the military and jokingly referred to as "beltway bandits" because they're sprinkled around the Washington beltway ring-road, is where individuals with the right mix of skills might be working. Some of these contractors are now known to have been involved in classified bio-defence projects. One of these secret projects, carried out in the Nevada desert, was part of a series of three In the first few days of September last year - immediately prior to the attacks of the 11th, the New York Times carried a major investigation which at any other time would have been a story of huge significance...It revealed three secret bio-defence projects at a time when the American people believed none was taking place. One - run by a contractor - Battelle - was to create genetically altered anthrax. The question now is - are there more such projects?

MILTON LEITENBERG: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: now we've discovered that the CIA is in this business too, though presumably only through contractors. But we don't know how many contractors. One contractor is now publicly disclosed, Battelle, that did one of those projects. There may be other contractors, so there was this whole story has not been clarified publicly, so that's the rest of your iceberg, in other words we don't know how many contractors, we don't know how many projects.

WATTS: The 1998 paper study on anthrax in the mail was one secret project. Dr Rosenberg is making the astonishing suggestion that there may have been a deadly follow-up by somebody else. Last time she questioned the investigation, she was attacked by the FBI and the White House. But she says she's prepared to speak out again because she's so afraid of what might happen next.

DR BARBARA ROSENBERG: FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS: This person is.. knows a lot about forensic matters, knows exactly what he can be prosecuted for and what he can get away with and I think he had some personal matters that he might have wanted to settle but I think in addition that he felt that biodefence was being under-emphasised for some time in the past

WATTS: Rosenberg's claims are astonishing but she's an insider with good contacts. She thinks the FBI must act soon.

ROSENBERG: I think the time is rapidly coming when it will be very important to bring him to trial, even if they don't think they have sufficient evidence. This might at least, if not result in a criminal conviction, make it possible to bring civil charges somewhat like what happened to OJ Simpson in the past. So I think it's time to start moving because it's very important from the point of view of deterrence of any possible future terrorist.

WATTS: America's desire to protect its biodefense programme from scrutiny at all costs was part of why it walked away from an international agreement to control biological weapons last summer. Could its near obsessive secrecy have come home to roost? breeding a climate that allowed one of its experts to take a step too far and turn bio-terrorist against his own?

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT WAS READ OUT AFTER THE BROADCAST : The CIA have told Newsnight they totally reject Dr Rosenberg's theory and say they were unaware of ANY project to assess the impact of anthrax sent through the mail.

This Barbara Rosenburg should be given the Noble Peace Prize. We now know the Canadians had performed just such a test recently (and the CDC and FBI had somehow remained ignorant) and that the CIA have been caught hindering the FBI investigation over disclosure of 'current 'US anthrax production. The implications for the CIA here could be very grave- calls for overhauls could threaten its current existence, something that they would not give up easily. The recent vicious deaths of biowarfare-connected-scientists (especially the almost blatant ones in England) could very well be their idea of a cover-up. As it is, the chance of the hobbled FBI investigators gaining any kind of victory over their CIA big brothers are remote without public awareness.

CIA chief says Iraq had contact with al-Qaeda
(FT.com)
March 19 2002
George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Tuesday, said that the agency had evidence that Iraq has had contact with the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Speaking to the Senate armed service committee Mr Tenet said that Iraq, which was included in President George W. Bush's Axis of Evil, "has a long history of supporting terrorism".
His comments will heighten concerns that the US is preparing to attack Iraq in a bid to oust Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as part of the US-led war on terror. Warning that Baghdad was "well aware" of the "serious consequences" of a link-up with al-Qaeda Mr Tenet however failed to provide evidence of co-operation between the two sides.
On Tuesday, Dick Cheney, US vice-president, wound up a tour of nine Arab states designed to garner support for a US attack against Iraq. Arriving in Turkey, Mr Cheney was expected to meet Bulent Ecevit, Turkey's prime minister, to discuss a possible attack on its neighbour.
On Monday, Iraq appeared to launch a charm offensive designed to counter any regional support for an attack. Taha Yassin Ramadan, Iraq's vice-president, annonuced that international arms inspectors would be allowed back in the country but that access would be conditional on an agreement on a timetable and locations to be monitored.

CIA warns Germany, Britain of bomb attacks-report
06:22 03-16-02
BERLIN, March 16 (Reuters) - The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has warned Germany and Britain about possible bomb attacks by members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, Germany's Focus magazine reported on Saturday.
Citing a memo circulated on March 8 by Germany's BKA federal police authority, the magazine said the CIA tip-off was based on surveillance of two suspected al-Qaeda members in Pakistan.
The two were quoted by the CIA as saying there would soon be "good news" about bomb explosions in Germany and Britain. According to the report, due to be published in Focus magazine's Monday edition, the BKA classed the CIA alert as "vague" because it did not mention any time, target or method.
But the authority said the fact there could still be al-Qaeda "sleepers" in Germany meant security services should assume there was "an unchanged high risk situation in Germany."
Germany has been a centre of the worldwide investigation into the September 11 hijacked plane attacks on U.S. cities since it emerged that three of the four kamikaze pilots studied in the northern city of Hamburg.
Washington blames bin Laden for the attacks.
A German government spokeswoman declined to comment on the report but said that American and German security services remained in close contact with one another.

Fathers Say 9-11 Suspects Showed No Warning Signs (ABCNEWS)

Indian comic strip spoofs US president George Bush
NEW DELHI, March 19
(Reuters) - "It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Dubyaman making the world safe for democracy."
Dubyaman, an Indian comic strip superhero, is a parody of the gaffe-prone U.S. president, George W. Bush, and his blustering oratory through a host of problems from Afghanistan and the India-Pakistan spat to religious riots in northern India.
One series has Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee telling "Dubyaji" that people believe Pakistani intelligence was behind the Godhra incident.
"Gee, that's great! It means that your fanatics and their fanatics are working together in a spirit of cooperation -- your first joint venture exercise," says Dubyaman.

Saturn by the Moon

North Korea Accused Of Using Abducted Brainwashed 'Sleeper Agents'
(Globe-Intel)
3-17-2
North Korea has been engaged for the past twenty years in a world-wide abduction program of young women - who are used to produce "sleeper agents."
As many as 60 girls have been kidnapped from Europe by intelligence officers working for North Korea's repressive regime.
The staggering story of the program was revealed this week in a Japanese court.
A senior Japanese intelligence officer has said the program was designed to produce "sleeper agents" - who would then be used to spy on their own people. Or, when old enough, would be encouraged to go abroad.
America and Britain were named as two of the countries where they could be operating.
The story emerged when one of the former North Korean agents, Megumi Yao, gave evidence about her role in the kidnapping in 1983 from London, England, of a twenty-three-year-old au pair girl, Keiko Arimoto.
She was abducted while a student at a language school in the city's prestigious Marble Arch area.
"My job was to target young women. They had to be without family ties or a boyfriend," said Yao.
The pretty young student -- who worked as an au pair looking after the children of a marketing executive, was persuaded by Yao to come with her to the Danish city of Copenhagen.
"Waiting there were other agents of North Korea," Yao told the court.
Using what she admitted were "brainwashing techniques" derived from
CIA's long-disgraced MK-ULTRA program, Yao said that Keiko Arimoto was "turned" inside twenty-four hours by a combination of drugs and other "mind control techniques."
She was then flown on a North Korean airlines flight to Pyongyang from Copenhagen.
There she was sent, according to Yao, to a "special breeding center."
The girl was artificially impregnated and gave birth to a child in 1988.
"The child was immediately taken from her," the Korean intelligence officer said. She is now in hiding in Japan.
If still alive, the child - his sex is not known - would now be fifteen years.
Japanese intelligence sources have told Globe-Intel that they are urgently tracking a gang working for the North Korean who specializes in the traffic of humans.
"Incredible though it seems, these children will have been bred to spy," said the source.
The details emerged in a Kobe court dealing with a passport forgery case.
"But the prospect that there are real-life Manchurian candidates out there who may have been programmed to kill is absolutely frightening," said a Japanese intelligence source.

Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the United States
(Le Monde)
Wednesday March 6
It is undoubtedly the largest affair of Israeli spying in the United States that has been made public since 1986. In June 2001, an investigative report details the activities of more than one hundred Israeli agents, some presenting themselves as fine arts students, others tied to Israeli high-tech companies.
All were challenged by the authorities, were questioned and a dozen of them would be still imprisoned. One their missions would have been to track the Al- Qaida terrorists on American territory, without informing the federal authorities of them. Elements of this investigation, taken up by American television Fox News, reinforce the thesis according to which Israel would not have transmitted to the United States all the evidence in its possession on the preparations of the September 11 attacks.
A vast operating Israeli spy network on American territory was dismantled, revealed in the latest delivery of the Online Intelligence Letter, publication specializing in questions of information.
It is the biggest affair blaming Mossad (the Israeli external security agency) activity against the United States since condemning to life in prison for Jonathan Pollard, an employee of the US Navy, in 1986, for spying for Israel's benefit. Which was the real scale of this network? The facts evoked by an American report/ratio of investigation do not indicate if it could reach information of first command, or if the authorities dismantled it in its initial phase.
According to the chief editor of Online Intelligence, Guillaume Dasquie, this "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents was neutralized by counter- espionage services of the Department of Justice." The Americans "would have apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals." M. Dasquie gives a report on a " 61 page review article " from June 2001, given to the American justice department by a "task force" made up of agents of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and some INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) agents "with which were associated the FBI and the office of investigation of US Air Force." Questioned by Le Monde, Will Glaspy, of the Public Affairs department of the DEA, authenticated this report/ratio, whose DEA "holds a copy." It is not the first time that information relating to Israeli espionage appeared in the United States since the Pollard affair. In June 1999, the review Insight had lengthily evoked a "secret" investigation of division 5 of the FBI regarding Israeli phone-tappings targeting the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council.
After the attacks of September 11, very little detailed information had come out about the arrest of some sixty Israelis. Finally, from the 11th to the 14 th of December 2001, the Fox News television channel aired an investigation in four parts into Israeli espionage in the United States, in the broadcast "Carl Cameron Investigates." The embassy from Israel in Washington immediately indicated that it did not contain " anything true." American Jewish organizations. JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), AIPAC (America-Israel Political Action Committee) and others. denounced a "machination." Fox withdrew from his Internet site, one day and half after its posting, all the material related to this investigation.
Le Monde requested three times with Fox News to provide a tape of the broadcast. It was never done. February 26 th, Fox answered our correspondent in New York that sending it posed "a problem", without being specific. Le Monde however took note of the whole script to this investigation. Carl Cameron evokes "a vast secret investigation held there" relating to "140 Israelis made to pass for students of the University of Jerusalem or Betzalel Academy of Arts [which have] unceasingly sought to come into contact with civil servants and, according to a document, targeted and penetrated military bases, dozens of buildings of the DEA, FBI, and others." His investigation focused on two aspects. One: could the Israelis have preliminary knowledge of the September 11 attacks and not have informed Americans? His sources, explains Carl Cameron, tell him: "the principal question is 'how they could have not known?'." On the screen, his editor-in-chief tells him thus: "Certain reports confirm that the Mossad sent representatives to the United States to warn them, before September 11, of the imminence of a major terrorist attack. That does not go in the direction of an absence of warning." Cameron's response: "the problem is not the absence of warning, but the absence of useful details" compared to those which American services suspect Israel of having held.
The second round of the investigation touches at Israeli companies providing administrations or American companies, which would conceal information. Aimed at the manufacturer of Amdocs software, placed on Wall Street, which lists, for the 25 major telephone companies of the United States, all the calls passed on, to and originating from American territory, as well as the companies Nice and Comverse Infosys, the latter providing of the data-processing programs to American ajencies authorized to proceed to listening. Comverse is suspected of having introduced into its systems of the "catch gates" in order to "intercept, record and store" these listenings. This hardware would render the "listener" himself "listened to." Question to Cameron: "are there reasons to believe the Israeli government is implicated?" Answer: "No, none, but a classified top-secret investigation is underway." The broadcast had been shown beforehand to the highest persons in charge of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA (the agency in charge of phone-tappings), the DEA and the American Justice Department, which had not uttered an objection to its airing.
The report submitted to the American Justice Department, to which Le Monde had access, shows that many of the "fine-arts students" suspected of illicit activity have a military past in the information or the advanced technology units. Some entered and left the United States on several occasions, remaining each time for short periods. Several are related to the Israeli companies of high-tech Amdocs, Nice and Retalix. Challenged, a "coed" saw her guarantee of 10,000 dollars paid by an Israeli working at Amdocs. Questioned, two others recognize being employed by Retalix.
Le Monde obtained other information not contained in this report. Six of the intercepted "students" had a cellular telephone bought by an Israeli ex-vice- consul in the United States. Two others, at an unspecified time, would have arrived to Miami by direct flight from Hamburg to go to the residence of an FBI agent, to propose tableaus to him, to leave again for the Chicago airport, to go to the residence of an agent of the justice department then to take again the plane directly for Toronto; all in one day.
More than a third of these "students," who, according to the report, moved in at least 42 American cities, stated to reside in Florida. Five at least were intercepted in Hollywood, and two in Fort Lauderdale. Hollywood is a town of 25,000 inhabitants to the north of Miami, close to Fort Lauderdale. However, at least 10 of the 19 terrorists from September 11 were residing in Florida.
Four of the five members of the group having diverted American Airlines flight number 11 - Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid and Wail Al-Shehri.
as well as one of the five terrorists of the United flight 175, Marwan Al- Shehhi, resided all at various times in... Hollywood, Florida. As for Ahmed Fayez, Ahmed and Hamza Al-Ghamdi and Mohand Al-Shehri, United flight 75, like Said Al-Ghamdi, Ahmed Al-Haznawi and Ahmed Al-Nami, of the United flight 93 which crashed September 11 in Pennsylvania, and Nawaq Al-Hamzi, of AA flight 77 (fallen on the Pentagon), they have all at one time resided at Delray Beach, in the north of Fort Lauderdale.
This agreement can be, inter alia, at the origin of the American conviction according to which one of the missions of the Israeli "students" would have been to track the Al-Qaida terrorists on their territory, without informing the federal authorities of them.
Two enigmas remain. Why the Israeli network "plugged" in priority of drug enforcement agents? An assumption: the DEA is the main American agency inquiring into the money laundering. A network such as Al-Qaida used "dirty" dies, and the Taliban's Afghanistan was the primary exporter of opium in the world. Why this astonishing "cover", of false students canvassers for poor tableaus? The Israeli network seemed to hold lists of names. Its members knew at which office or which private residence to go. The objective was apparently to make contact, even for a short time.
According to an Israeli specialist in espionage, "this story is a joke ridiculous, not serious." Contacted, the services of the Israeli Prime Minister still did not have, Monday evening March 4, answered our questions. The American Justice Department indicated to us that "a dozen" of these "students" would always be imprisoned, the others all would have been released or deported. The FBI indicated to us that it will not make "any comment at this stage." The CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the INS, the NSA, the Justice Department and the Pentagon have all designated an investigator on this file.

U.S. busts huge Israeli spy ring, says French paper
-FBI calls story 'bogus': Network may have secretly tracked al-Qaeda members before Sept. 11
(Reuters, with files from Agence France-Presse)
PARIS - The United States has broken up a huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al-Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities, a French newspaper reported yesterday.
A secret U.S. government report outlining spying activities by Israelis contained "elements [that] support the theory that Israel did not give the U.S. all the information it had about the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks," Le Monde stated.
It said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had confirmed the existence of the secret study, which says the Israelis posed as graphic arts students and tried to enter buildings belonging to the DEA and other U.S. agencies.
The newspaper's revelations followed an article by Intelligence Online, a Paris-based newsletter, which revealed the existence of the secret report and said 120 Israeli spies had been arrested or expelled.
A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said yesterday the Intelligence Online report was a "bogus story" and "there wasn't a spy ring." In addition, the agency said no Israeli had been charged with spying in the United States in connection with a probe of a ring of Israeli agents.
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington also dismissed the Intelligence Online article as "nonsense."
In its report, Le Monde said, "A vast Israeli espionage network operating on American territory has been broken up."
The newspaper published what it said were excerpts from the introduction of the June, 2001, report, including a comment that the women in the spy ring were "usually very attractive."
The Israeli ring was active in Arkansas, California, Florida and Texas, and was made up of about 20 cells of four to eight members aged 22-30 and had recently completed Israeli military service in an army intelligence unit.
More than one-third of them had lived in Florida, also the base for at least 10 of the 19 Arabs involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
At least five of the spies lived in Hollywood, Fla., where alleged hijacker Mohammad Atta and four accomplices in the attacks also lived.
Two Israelis lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Delray Beach, where hijackers in the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania resided temporarily.
"This concordance could be the source of the American view that one of the missions of the Israeli 'students' could have been to track al-Qaeda terrorists on [U.S] territory without informing federal authorities," Le Monde said.
It noted Fox News television reported in December that Israeli agents were sent to the United States before Sept. 11 to warn Washington about a threat, but the agents did not have enough useful information for U.S. officials to act on.
Le Monde, which said it had seen a copy of the secret report, said it also had learned six suspected spies had used portable telephones bought by a former Israeli vice-consul in the United States.
Several suspected spies had frequently entered and left the United States after only short stays.
"The network targeted some of the most sensitive sites in the United States," Intelligence Online said.
It added the suspected agents also had cultivated contacts with Israeli information technology companies based in the United States and serving as regular suppliers to various U.S. federal agencies.

REPOST:U.S. Police and Intelligence Hit by Spy Network-Spies Tap Police and Government Phones (Newsmax.com)
Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2001
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, the FBI has stumbled on the largest espionage ring ever discovered inside the United States. The U.S. Justice Department is now holding nearly 100 Israeli citizens with direct ties to foreign military, criminal and intelligence services.
The spy ring reportedly includes employees of two Israeli-owned companies that currently perform almost all the official wiretaps for U.S. local, state and federal law enforcement.
The U.S. law enforcement wiretaps, authorized by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), appear to have been breached by organized crime units working inside Israel and the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.
Both Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were warned on Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from local, state and federal law enforcement officials. The warning stated, "Law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted."
The spy ring enabled criminals to use reverse wiretaps against U.S. intelligence and law enforcement operations. The illegal monitoring may have resulted in the deaths of several informants and reportedly spoiled planned anti-drug raids on crime syndicates.
Global Spy and Crime Network
The penetration of the U.S. wiretap system has led to a giant spy hunt across the globe by American intelligence agencies. U.S. intelligence officials now suspect the spy ring shared and sold information to other nations.
"Why do you think Putin so nonchalantly and with such great fanfare announced the shutdown of the Lourdes listening post in Cuba?" noted Douglas Brown, president of Multilingual Data Solutions Inc. and program director at the Nathan Hale Institute.
"Besides the PR benefit right before his visit here, the Russians don't need it anymore. They've scraped together a cheaper, more effective monitoring system. Is the Israeli company an element of that system? I don't know," stated Brown.
"With all the whining and crying about Echelon and Carnivore, critics, domestic and foreign, of U.S. electronic eavesdropping vastly overestimate our abilities to process and disseminate the stuff," noted Brown.
"The critics also underestimated the incompetence and total ineptness of the people running our intelligence and law enforcement services during the Clinton-Gore years. One guy uses his home computer for storing top secret documents; another high-tech guru guy can't figure out how to save and retrieve his e-mail, and the guy in charge of everything is having phone sex over an open line with one of his employees," said Brown.
"On the other hand, the Europeans, including the Russians, have been much more focused on the nuts and bolts of practical systems to process the information they scoop up. The stories linking German intelligence and the L&H scandal got very little play here but were widely noted in the European software community," said Brown.
"Except for a few Germans and an occasional Pole, nobody can match the Russians in designing and developing algorithms. We may have some of the world's greatest programmers, but the Russians and Europeans do a better job of matching up linguists and area experts with their programmers," noted Brown.
The discovery of a major spy ring inside the United States is straining the already tense relations with Israel. Although, Israel denied any involvement with the penetration of the U.S. wiretap system, the CIA and FBI are investigating the direct government ties to the former Israeli military and intelligence officials now being held by the Justice Department.
Israeli Company Provides U.S. Wiretaps
One company reported to be under investigation is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm. Comverse provides almost all the wiretapping equipment and software for U.S. law enforcement.
Custom computers and software made by Comverse are tied into the U.S. phone network in order to intercept, record and store wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.
The penetration of Comverse reportedly allowed criminals to wiretap law enforcement communications in reverse and foil authorized wiretaps with advance warning. One major drug bust operation planned by the Los Angeles police was foiled by what now appear to be reverse wiretaps placed on law enforcement phones by the criminal spy ring.
Flawed laws Led to Compromise
Several U.S. privacy and security advocates contend the fault actually lies in the CALEA legislation passed by Congress that allowed the spy ring to operate so effectively. Lisa Dean, vice president for technology policy at Free Congress Foundation, delivered a scathing critique of the breach of the U.S. law enforcement wiretap system.
"We are exercising our 'I told you so' rights on this," said Dean.
"From the beginning, both the political right and left warned Congress and the FBI that they were making a huge mistake by implementing CALEA. That it would jeopardize the security of private communications, whether it's between a mother and her son or between government officials. The statement just issued by law enforcement agencies has confirmed our worst fears," concluded Dean.
"How many more 9/11s do we have to suffer?" asked Brad Jansen, deputy director for technology policy at the Free Congress Foundation.
"The CALEA form of massive surveillance is a poor substitute for real law enforcement and intelligence work. It is an after-the-fact method of crime fighting. It is not designed to prevent crime. Massive wiretapping does not equal security. Instead, we have elected to jeopardize our national security in exchange for poor law enforcement," said Jansen.
"For example, FINCEN monitoring of all money transactions did not detect al-Qaeda, nor did it find Mohamed Atta before he boarded his last flight. It was an ATM receipt left in his rental car that led the FBI to the bin Laden bank accounts," noted Jansen.
U.S. National Security Compromised
"The CALEA approach is the same approach law enforcement has been pushing for a number of years. It's the same approach that was used to push Carnivore, Magic Lantern, FINCEN and even the failed Clipper project. This approach leads to a compromise in national security and in personal security for the American public," said Jansen.
"In addition, there is always government abuse of these kinds of systems," stated Jansen. "Law enforcement on all levels does a very poor job in policing itself. We need to hold our police and government officials to the highest standards."
"This also hurts the U.S. economy when the whole world knows that our communication systems are not secure. We cannot compete with inferior products when other countries are exporting secure software and hardware. New Zealand, India and Chile already offer security products that actually provide real security," stated Jansen.
"The current mentality of law enforcement is what failed to protect us from 9/11. CALEA wiretaps will not protect us from terror attacks in the future. The system does not provide better intelligence information. It actually leads to less security and more crime. We get the worst of both worlds," concluded Jansen.

Florida Commercial Fishermen Find Massive 'Black Water' Dead Zone (Naples Daily News via Rense.com)
3-17-2
Commercial fishermen along the Southwest Florida coast are reporting a massive dead zone that is almost devoid of marine life in an area of the Gulf of Mexico traditionally known as a rich fishing ground. They've dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that local, state and national government agencies find out what's causing it. Scientists who have heard of the phenomenon say they, too, need answers.
Commercial fishermen along the Southwest Florida coast are reporting a massive dead zone that is almost devoid of marine life in an area of the Gulf of Mexico traditionally known as a rich fishing ground.
They've dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that local, state and national government agencies find out what's causing it.
Scientists who have heard of the phenomenon say they, too, need answers.
"It's killed a lot of the bottom because recently a lot of little bottom plants are coming to the surface dead and rotten out in the Gulf," said Tim Daniels, 58, a Marathon Key fish-spotting pilot who has been flying over the Gulf for more than 20 years.
Like Daniels, fishermen with decades on the water say they've often seen red tide but they've never seen anything like this " it doesn't have a foul smell, it isn't red tide and it isn't oil. They describe it as viscous and slimy water with what looks like spider webs in it.
First sighted in January, the mass of black-colored water reached from 20 miles north of Marathon Key halfway to Naples. It stretched west almost 20 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen don't know if it's moved in from the north or offshore or if it originated in the coastal waters off Southwest Florida.
Though somewhat smaller now than descriptions from January, the mass of water that is still quite large is moving into the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Created by Congress in 1990, the 2,800-square-mile Sanctuary adjacent to the Keys is the largest coral reef in the United States. It includes the productive waters of Florida Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
Part of the ecosystem is an extensive nursery, feeding and breeding ground that supports a variety of marine species and a multimillion-dollar fishing industry that brings in almost 20 million pounds of seafood each year.
Billy Causey, superintendent of the Sanctuary, told the Naples Daily News recently that there is real concern in the scientific community about the overall health of the Gulf.
Causey said contributing to the problems afflicting the shallow body is global warming, extended periods when the Gulf waters aren't cooling in the winter, and the growing impact of human activity along coastlines.
"What we're seeing is part of a bigger picture," Causey said. "We're seeing accelerated problems around periods of elevated temperatures."
Those problems, beginning in the early 1980s, include more frequent and longer lasting coral bleaching events that by 1990 were affecting stouter coral reefs closer to shore and more adapted to wide temperature swings.
"There are places that are still beautiful but the shallow reefs would make you cry," said Causey, a Keys diver since the 1950s.
Scientists with Mote Marine Laboratory based in Sarasota said they are aware of the black water phenomenon but hadn't yet been able to test water samples.
Erich Bartels, staff biologist at the Lab's Center for Tropical Research in the Keys, said he'd only seen samples too old for testing that were brought in by crabbers.
"If you held it up to the light, it had a blackish tint to it," he said. "...If you have black water, there is something going on. It's some kind of dead zone. We just don't know. We're trying to get samples."
Mote is willing to send out testing kits to fishermen who might encounter the black water zone, but Bartels said in the absence of a kit, fishermen could put a sample in a clean bottle and keep it in a cool, dark place until they could get it to a lab.
Karen Steidinger, senior biology research scientist for the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg, said she hadn't yet heard about the phenomenon. She said there's a summer release of brown water from the Shark River about 35 miles south of Marco Island, but she doubted the black water was that. The description relayed to her from fishermen didn't allow her to speculate on a cause.
Steidinger said samples of the water that had been properly handled would provide the best answer.
Black water surfaces
Daniels said he first noticed the black water when he went out in mid-January, ahead of kingfish season, to see what fishermen had in store for 2002.
When he was flying over water that was 50 feet deep and north of the Keys, Daniels began to notice a change in the water color.
"I thought, 'What in the world is going on here?"' Daniels said. "I went out to the northwest and it was solid black. And I went to the west to get off of it " out to 70 or 80 feet of water north of the Marquesas (Islands) " and it was still there. I came back in and turned north of Key West and it went north. (More than) halfway to Naples from Key West, it was black across the whole place."
Although there are almost no fish in the zone, Daniels said, the few that fishermen found there " and other fish that entered the water " reacted strangely.
"You'd see them here and there, but they were jumping and running, not stopping " and acting different," Daniels said. "Like they didn't want to be there."
Other pilots and fishermen report the same.
Mike Richardson, based out of Everglades City, has been fish-spotting for 25 of his 50 years and said next to the normally green water, the black water stands out like night versus day.
He's quit flying over it.
"There's no sense going into it," he said. "You can't see anything."
He hasn't seen dead fish in the water, though there have been numerous large fish kills in recent months off Southwest Florida. Most, according to the Florida Marine Research Institute, have been attributed to red tide " a naturally occurring microscopic organism in the water.
Fishermen like Howie Grimm, 42, who has been in the business out of Everglades City since he was 15, insist the black water isn't red tide.
"It's something totally different from anything I've seen," Grimm said. "We have to figure out what it is. There's no fish in it. It's like dead water."
Richardson, too, has seen plenty of red tide, whose origins are still not fully understood by scientists.
"This is not like anything I've ever seen," he said.
When pilots from the air see boats move through a red tide zone, they often cut the reddish or brownish water to reveal green below.
That doesn't occur in the black water.
"This (dark) stuff goes all the way to the bottom," Richardson said.
Boats that have 4 to 5 feet of hull below the surface cut through 35 to 40 feet of water and leave nothing but the same black water in their wakes. It's the same at depths of 15 feet, he said.
"It didn't matter where they ran through it, nothing left a trail," Richardson said.
Grimm has reported the phenomenon to officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but said he hasn't heard back yet.
That it's affected the fishery, commercial fishermen have no doubt.
"I've net-fished for mackerel all my life," Daniels said. "This is the first year that we haven't caught one Spanish mackerel in the Marathon area. They're not there."
The southeast corner of Florida Bay, an area flushed by Atlantic waters, is the only place fishermen are catching mackerel, and they're doing it with hooks and lines, he said.
Symptoms of a sick Gulf?
Along with the newly discovered black water and coral bleaching, there have been other problems with the Gulf that have been documented for years.
They include a New Jersey-sized dead zone coming off the Mississippi River outlet to the Gulf that consumes a larger area each summer.
There are incidences of a contamination known as fibro papiloma in green turtles that live in Florida Bay.
And now fishermen from Fort Myers Beach to the Keys wonder if there might be new problems to worry about.
They said there have been bigger fish kills that aren't making it onto government reports. The largest, many say, occurred late last year about 30 miles off Tampa Bay. It had shrimpers pulling up netloads of dead and decaying fish off the bottom, they said.
Some shrimpers based on Fort Myers Beach worry that a recent and unexplained slew of flesh-destroying infections they've seen among their number may be related to problems in the Gulf.
Charles Bruns and Willie Sherwood, both commercial fisherman out of Fort Myers Beach, have been affected by a flesh-eating bacteria. The bacteria has been affecting many fisherman whose home port is Fort Myers Beach.
The infection is diagnosed as cellulitis in three of their medical reports. They say it begins with a blister on the skin but swells to a large nodule before it erupts and then spreads. It can only be treated with stout antibiotics.
It was mentioned by fisherman David Wellsley on CenterPoint, a 7 a.m. Sunday radio talk show hosted by Gary Burris and Ralf Brooks on WNOG-AM 1200 and 1270. Dan Basta, director of the National Marine Sanctuary program, will be the guest today, along with pilot Daniels, discussing the black water phenomenon as well as other problems with the Gulf.
Two of the Fort Myers Beach fishermen who suffered the infections are Kevin Flanaghan, who nearly lost his foot, and Willie Sherwood. They work for different fleets; both run out of Fort Myers Beach.
Both of them and others say there is fear among laborers in their line of work about the infection that seems to follow cuts doused with waters from the Gulf.
Many report taking precautions such as bleaching their gear and washing up with heavy-duty anti-bacterial soap after pulling in their nets.
The fishermen contend it's a new phenomenon. But some boat owners and local health officials speculated that the fishermen's compromising way of life " the drinking, long-term exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays and weeks at sea when they are never dry " is the culprit for their infections.
The men won't lie about their lifestyles. They admit living from paycheck to paycheck, partying and drinking " then cleaning up for the most part when they're at sea.
They call it coming off the hill. They'll work for 20 days or more catching fish " and then spend the money they earn in a few days ashore.
But they also say folks in their line of work have been doing that for decades without the fear of this sort of infection.
Ray Hoggard, 49, is among the many who say the infection is a hot topic.
"It's common talk on the ship-to-ship radios," he said.
A few times in recent weeks, boats have had to bring in for treatment some men who were stricken.
"It's a hell of a coincidence or something's up," Hoggard said.
Grant Erickson, 48, owner of Fort Myers' Erickson and Jensen Seafood, has a fleet of eight boats. He said he, too, hadn't seen the likes of these infections in the business that his family has been in for a half-century.
"It seems like there's something on the bottom ... these boats (nets) drag the bottom," he said. "I don't think it's the lifestyle of the fishermen that's changed. If anything it's better than years past. There's nothing new except the infections."
Dr. Mark Brown, an infectious disease specialist in Naples, said without seeing and testing the infections there is no way to identify the organism or organisms that caused them.
He said the next logical step would be for someone to do an epidemiological study of the fishermen to compare them to a control group to find out what's causing the infections.
Unless doctors are culturing the bug to see what it is, they may never find out, Brown said.
"They need to find out if they all have the same bug," Brown said. "They're going to have to try harder to make a microbiological diagnosis of what germ is causing this. . . They may not even be looking."
Health officials from Lee County, where the affected fisherman are based, said they investigate any of more than 70 communicable diseases and any odd health-related occurrence.
"We need to gather a lot of information," said Dr. Judith Hartner, director of the Lee County Health Department. "The first step is somebody needs to report it."
Three doctors who've seen the affected men said they didn't culture the organism that caused the infection.
Brown said the symptoms of the infection " the swelling, fast pace and flesh-destroying nature as reported by the fishermen " sounds like Vibrio vulnificus, a common seagoing organism. However, he didn't speculate on why or if it might be on the rise among fishermen.
According to a Johns Hopkins University Web site, the bug frequents areas where the water temperature remains high throughout the year and are most abundant in summer. The infection progresses at a rapid pace and can be fatal.
Hartner said her agency needs to answer a number of questions before deciding if the infections warrant investigation.
"Do the fishermen think it's unusual?" she asked. "If we do an investigation and we find out the cause, is there anything we can do to prevent it? We don't know that it's on the rise. It could be coincidence."

Mysterious Giant Fish Washes Up on Florida Beach (St. Petersburg Times via Cosmiverse)
March 18, 2002 8:30 CDT

Jeff Winans owns a Shore Acres home in St. Petersburg, Florida. He's used to seeing things wash up on the shore by his house, but last Friday he saw something that stumped him completely. It wasn't the usual trash/deadwood/fish kind of thing at all; in fact, he wasn't sure what it was at all.
What it looked like most was something out of a prehistoric "Who's Who" of water-dwellers. Armor plated, the fish was white and about 5 feet in length. It had a sucker for a mouth and rows upon rows of bony yellow plates that seem to be some sort of cartilage. On the backside, it appeared to have some kind of armor covering it completely.
According to the St. Petersburg Times, many people tried to identify the creature, but while it had some of the characteristics of some things, it didn't really look exactly like anything that anyone had ever seen before.
They called the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburgh, but no one was available to come out to see it. Send pictures, they were advised. We'll look at them and get back to you.
Instead, Winans called a local television station that came out and featured the strange beast on their newscast and invited people to call in with suggestions on what it might be. Many different ideas were suggested, but the one that seems to win the prize labels the fish as a sturgeon.
Sturgeon are the oldest living species of fish, dating back 250-million years. They existed at the same time as the dinosaurs, and have been described as "living fossils." They also are rarely seen. The Winans plan to send pictures in to the research Institute to verify the rare find.

Birth defects in UK babies rise by 50% (NewScientist.com)
18 March 02
The number of babies born in Britain with certain birth defects has risen by 50 percent in the past five years, according to research by Birth Defects Foundation, a medical charity. The rise is probably due to environmental factors, say scientists.
Incidences of cleft lip or palate rose from nearly six cases per 10,000 births in 1995 to over nine in 1999, says the charity.
Hypospadias, where the opening to the penis is underneath the shaft, has risen from 7.5 cases per 10,000 to 8.5 and gastroschisis, where the intestines protrude through the abdominal wall, has risen from 1.3 per 10,000 to 1.9, BDF says.
Michael Patton, medical director of BDF and head of medical genetics at St George's Hospital in London, speculates that illegal drug use may be to blame for one of the defects: "Gastroschisis appears to be much more common in babies born of teenage mothers in urban areas and could be due to recreational drug use during pregnancy, although research needs to be carried out to see if this is the case."
Hypospadias may be linked to the increase of oestrogen-mimicking chemicals in the environment, says Iuen Hughes, professor of paediatrics at Cambridge University. He is carrying out research funded by BDF into the molecular mechanism of the disorder.
"The positioning of the urethra in the developing penis is heavily dependent on coordinated androgen action. Our cellular model shows that oestrogen-like chemicals in the environment interfere with the action of the fetal androgen receptors, causing abnormality," Hughes told New Scientist.
Other birth defects are declining. Incidences of spina bifida has fallen by two-thirds, probably due to women boosting their levels of folic acid in early pregnancy.
The increasing age of first-time mothers was not thought to be significant in neonatal defects because it is linked to increased risk of chromosomal abnormalities such as Down's syndrome. These can be picked up early on in pregnancy and so often lead to termination.
Patton estimates one in 16 of all babies born have some abnormality ranging from fatal heart defects, deafness or learning difficulties to minor conditions such as a heart murmur or extra tissue growth on a hand - like a finger - that can be easily removed with surgery.
The BDF figures are six times higher than the official UK government's statistics, although a spokesman from the Office of National Statistics said: "It has long been recognised that there is under-reporting."
Patton told New Scientist: "Our figures for birth defects are higher because we do not just look at severe physical defects present at birth but include all defects." The BDF announced the new figures at the start of their campaign to introduce a five-point plan to having a healthy baby.

Firefighters need 90 minutes to drag 740 pound woman out of her house (1010wins.com)
Mar 19, 2002 9:58 am US/Eastern
DOVER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) -- Emergency workers and firefighters lashed together several stretchers and dismantled the front door of a house to remove a 740-pound woman who was having difficulty breathing.
Carol Terpay, 59, remained in intensive care Tuesday at Community Medical Center in Toms River, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Officials said Terpay fell in and out of consciousness during the 90 minutes it took to extricate her from her Ortley Beach home.
First aid workers and firefighters lashed together three stretchers, slid them under Terpay's mattress and dragged the woman to the front door, officials said.
Part of an enclosed porch was dismantled and several bushes, a tree and a neighbor's fence were removed to clear a path to the door for an ambulance.
One firefighter sprained his shoulder using a chain saw to cut away bushes.
Neighbors said Terpay has been bedridden for years and had a caretaker who looked after her.

We saw 'Bigfoot', claim villagers (Straitstimes.asia1.com.sg)
One villager in north-east India captures a furry creature on video, but experts say it could be a bear
BIGFOOT is back. So claim tribal villagers in the north-east Indian state of Meghalaya.
When Mr Nebilson Sangma revealed last month that he had stumbled across a scary, furry creature on a hunting trip in the jungles of the West Garo Hills, many thought he was spinning a tale.
But they changed their mind when Mr Dipu Marak captured on video the nesting place of the creature a few days later.
The video footage apparently revealed tell-tale signs of the existence of Mande Burung - the mythical monster in these parts of India akin to Bigfoot or Yeti of the Himalayas, last spotted in 1992.
Wildlife experts and biologists had then discovered footprints measuring some 50 cm in the same area - the foothills of a peak in the Nokrek National Park.
According to Mr Sangma, the creature walked erect like a human, had built a house-like nesting place and would emerge from it frequently to feast on a banana grove.
''After overcoming the initial shock, my brother and I observed this gigantic hairy creature for three consecutive days from afar,'' he said.
A trader by profession, Mr Sangma informed forest and wildlife officials about his discovery.
''It's difficult to say for sure,'' said the divisional forest officer of West Garo Hills, Mr W.G. Momin.
According to forest officials, the creature could in all probability be a bear that had come down from the Himalayan forests to the north of Meghalaya. The area is also a known elephant habitat.
But Mr Sangma contended: ''Having read books and watched television, I can differentiate between animals.''
Meanwhile, officials and villagers have been hunting for the creature in the forests, but Mande Burung seems to have disappeared as furtively as it had appeared.

Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses -Biggest Event Of Last 30 Years
(EurekAlert.org)
3-19-2
Recent satellite imagery analyzed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder has revealed that the northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf, a large floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, has shattered and separated from the continent in the largest single event in a 30-year series of ice shelf retreats in the peninsula.
"This breakup gave us the information we need to reassess the stability of ice shelves around the rest of the Antarctic continent," said glaciologist Ted Scambos. "They are closer to the limit than we thought."
The shattered ice has formed a plume of thousands of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. A total of about 3,250 square kilometers or 1,250 square miles, of shelf area has disintegrated in a 35-day period beginning on Jan. 31 of this year.
Over the last five years, the Larsen B shelf has lost a total of 5,700 square kilometers -- 2,200 square miles -- and is now about 40 percent the size of its previous minimum stable extent.
Scientists worldwide have monitored the Larsen B shelf since November 2001, when a researcher at the Instituto Ant·rtico Argentino warned the community of an impending breakup in the wake of warm spring temperatures and a dramatic 20 percent increase in the ice shelf's flow rate.
International cooperation between Argentinian, American, British, Austrian and German scientists has resulted in detailed information on the breakup from field observations, shipboard studies and a variety of satellite sensors.
Scientists attribute the retreats to strong regional climate warming. Antarctic temperatures have increased about 2.5 degrees Celsius since the late 1940s. Since 1974 ice shelf extent in the Antarctic Peninsula has declined by about 13,500 square kilometers, or 5,200 square miles.
Scambos and colleagues Mark Fahnestock at the University of Maryland and Christine Hulbe of Portland State University have theorized that once melt water appears on the surface, the rate of ice disintegration increases. They say melt water ponding on the surface in late summer magnifies fracturing by filling smaller cracks. From there, Scambos said, the weight of the water drives the cracks through the ice, making it shatter.
"The next shelf to the south, the Larsen C, is very near its stability limit, and may start to recede in coming decades if the warming trend continues," he said. "More importantly, regions of the giant "Ross Ice Shelf are just a few degrees Celsius away from being overtaken by the same processes that have destroyed the Larsen."
Ice shelves are thick plates of ice, fed by glaciers, that float on the ocean around much of Antarctica. The Larsen B was about 220 meters thick. Based on studies of shelf ice flow and sediment thickness beneath the ice shelf, the Larsen B is thought to have existed for at least 400 years prior to current events.
The breakup of peninsular ice shelves has little direct consequence for sea-level rise. However the shelves act as buttresses, or braking systems, for glaciers on the continent.
"Loss of ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic continent could have a major effect on the rate of ice flow off the continent," Scambos said. "The Ross ice shelf for instance, is the main outlet for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which encompasses several large glaciers and contains the equivalent of 5 meters of sea level in its perched ice."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-03/uoca-ais031802.php

Confirmed African Ebola Cases Rise to 91
(UN Integrated Regional Information Networks)
March 18, 2002
There have been a total of 91 confirmed cases of the Ebola virus in the Republic of Congo (RoC) and neighbouring Gabon, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported in its latest situation update on 15 March.
As of 9 March, there had been 31 confirmed cases, including 18 deaths, in the central Cuvette region of RoC, which borders the Ogooue-Invindo province of Gabon, the agency stated.
Reports were received of deaths between mid-January and 8 March in three remote villages, approximately 65 km north-west of Kelle in western RoC, with the majority of the cases occurring in Ambomi, WHO reported. A further 58 contacts were being followed up, it said.
As of 12 March, the Gabonese Ministry of Health had reported 60 confirmed cases in Gabon, including 50 deaths. The most recent cases were confined to the Ogooue-Invindo province, northern Gabon, with the last two confirmed deaths occurring in Makokou and Mekambo on 23 February and 10 March respectively, the ministry reported. A further 62 contacts were being followed up.
A 50-km road has just been reopened in the affected area of RoC and a team from the international health organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), presently in Kelle, would travel to the villages as soon as possible, WHO reported.
The team - comprising staff from WHO, the Congolese Ministry of Health and Epicentre-Paris, a partner in the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network - would be collecting samples and referring them for laboratory analysis, WHO reported.
It would also be prepared to implement barrier nursing practices, surveillance and health education analysis if requested, the report added.

"Superbeings" May Mave Created the Universe in a Lab - Scientist (Source: Independent UK )
March 18, 2002 8:30 CDT
Questions about how our universe came to be are never in short supply. Now a British physicist says our universe may have been born as part of an experiment carried out in another space and time.
"Our universe could easily be the outcome of an experiment carried out by a superior intelligence in another universe," says Edward Harrison, formerly of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
His theory sounds crazy, but it sheds light on an issue that has always puzzled scientists: why the laws of physics are so finely tuned for our existence. Even slight deviations in the laws would result in a universe devoid of stars and life.
For example, if the force of gravity were just a few percent weaker, it would be unable to squeeze and heat the matter inside stars to the millions of degrees required to trigger sunlight-generating nuclear reactions. But if gravity were just a few percent stronger, it would heat up stars, causing them to consume their fuel faster. They would not exist for the billions of years needed for evolution to produce intelligence.
These details can be found in all aspects of our universe, and one possible explanation is that the universe was "designed" by God. Some scientists accept this, but "unfortunately, it terminates further scientific enquiry", says Harrison. The other possibility is that the universe is that way because, if it were not, we would not be here to notice.
This odd reasoning, known as the "anthropic principle", offers that it is no accident we are in a universe finely tuned for the existence of galaxies, stars and life. We could hardly have evolved in a universe that was not. The anthropic principle leads to the idea that our universe is one of countless others, and in each universe of this "multiverse", forces like gravity have different strengths. But an unavoidable consequence is that most universes do not have the special conditions needed for the birth of galaxies, stars, planets and so on.
"There will be countless lifeless universes," says Harrison. "This is waste on a truly cosmic scale." But Harrison says there could be a third way. He says the multiverse may not be a wasteland -- it could be dominated by universes that have galaxies and stars and life. Life-bearing universes are able to reproduce, says Harrison. He suggests that intelligent life actually create new universes.
"If so, then in offspring universes which are fit for life, new life evolves to a high level of intelligence, then creates further universes," he says. His scheme, which is called the "natural selection of universes", states that the laws of physics most suited for the emergence and evolution of life are naturally selected by life itself. Our universe was created by super-intelligent beings living in another universe, he says.
Say Harrison's theory turns out to be right. The fine-tuning of the laws of physics would have two possible explanations. New universes could inherit the characteristics of their cosmic parents, in the same way that children inherit the characteristics of their parents. Small "genetic variations" in the laws between generations would ensure that new universes were not carbon copies of their predecessors.
The parent of our universe was likely fine tuned for life and similar to ours, because if it were not, life would never have arisen in it to make our universe -- our universe must also be fine-tuned. One possible explanation for the fine-tuning is that the makers of our universe engineered our universe to have laws that promoted the evolution of intelligent life.
Harrison says the reason our universe seems engineered for life is that it was designed not by God -- a Supreme Being -- but by superior beings, sort of like angels. "Intelligent life takes over universe-making business," says Harrison. "Consequently, the creation of the universe drops out of the religious sphere and becomes amenable to science."
One critical piece of Harrison's reasoning is the assumption that it is possible to make a universe, and even though that sounds outlandish, it is possible. The recipe was discovered independently around 1980 by Alexei Starobinsky in what was then the Soviet Union and Alan Guth in America. In their "inflationary" picture, our Universe "inflated" from a super-dense "seed" of matter, perhaps only a thousandth of a gram. This prompted Guth to suggest that it would be possible to make a universe in the laboratory.
Simply take a seed of matter and squeeze it to the extraordinary density that once triggered the inflation of our universe. This will make a black hole. Guth says the super-dense interior will inflate in a bubble-like space-time connected to our time by the "umbilical cord" of the hole. This cord is unstable, and when it breaks, a baby universe will be born.
"The practical details are not important," says Harrison. "The important thing is that if beings of our limited intelligence can dream up wild, yet seemingly plausible, schemes for making universes, beings of much higher intelligence might know theoretically and technically how to do it." It might not be possible for scientists in our time to recreate the conditions required for creating a universe, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible altogether.
"It's conceivable that more intelligent beings -- perhaps even our own descendants in the far future -- might possess not only the knowledge, but also the technology to build universes," says Harrison. The universe as we know it has about 10 billion galaxies. If, during the lifetime of each, a single civilization emerges which makes a new universe -- which is a modest figure, considering that our galaxy contains 200 billion suns -- then our universe reproduces 10 billion times. And if intelligent life in each galaxy of each daughter universe repeats the process once, the result is 10 billion times 10 billion granddaughter universes.
Einstein once said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Harrison says the explanation is that it was created by comprehensible beings - beings like us, but far more advanced. They made our universe to be like theirs, and their universe was in turn understandable, since they had to have the understanding to manipulate it and make a new universe.
But if our universe was created by superior beings in another universe, and theirs was created by superior beings in an earlier universe, who or what created the first universe?
Harrison admits that one possibility is God. However, he distinguishes between his idea and the religious view. "In my scheme, God starts things," he says. "Thereafter, superior beings take over the creation of further universes."
Another possibility is that in the beginning there was a large ensemble of universes, each having its own laws of physics. Most of the universes were dead, but just by chance, the conditions in at least one - the intelligent "mother universe" - were right for life. "Thereafter, intelligent universes come to dominate the ensemble, since they alone reproduce," says Harrison.
The world beyond your fingertips is stranger than you think. I reckon this guy's certainly growing something in his lab.

Makings of a 'Dirty Bomb'
-Radioactive Devices Left by Soviets Could Attract Terrorists (WASHPOST)
Six months ago, they were mere Cold War trash: hundreds of small radioactive power generators scattered across the Soviet Union decades ago and largely forgotten, except when the odd lumberjack turned up with severe radiation burns.
But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, these aging but potentially lethal devices are being viewed in a troubling new light: as possible components in a weapon to be used in a terrorist strike. Even more troubling, some of them have vanished.
In Georgia, on the Black Sea, a search is underway for at least two of the devices, called radiothermal generators, or RTGs, believed to have been abandoned and then stolen after the closing of a Soviet military base. Just before Christmas, three woodcutters in northwestern Georgia suffered massive injuries after stumbling upon a similar device in the middle of a forest.
In the far-eastern Russian region of Chukotka, investigators discovered a complete breakdown in controls over 85 radiothermal generators placed along the arctic coast by the Soviets in the 1960s and '70s. Some of the machines had been vandalized for scrap metal, others were literally falling into the surf and at least one could not be found, according to Russian government documents obtained by The Washington Post.
"The generators are placed on open land, are clearly visible from the sea and are visited by staff no more than once a year (in recent years, staff has not visited the sites at all)," said a report by a Russian commission that inspected the generators in 1997. "They would be easy targets for a terrorist attack, the consequences of which could be extremely serious."
Vladimir Yetylin, a legislator from Chukotka, located on the Bering Sea, said in an interview Friday that he suspected some generators were still missing and planned to press for an investigation.
"At the time, there was not enough money to gather up these [power] sources," said Yetylin, a member of the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, blaming the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The RTGs, used by the Soviets to power navigational beacons and communications equipment in remote areas, each contain up to 40,000 curies of highly radioactive strontium or cesium. Even a tiny fraction of a single curie of strontium has a high probability of causing a fatal cancer, according to a calculation by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nuclear watchdog group. While cesium and strontium cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, the two heavy metals could contaminate large areas if combined with conventional explosives in a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb."
"This stuff can be just ghastly to clean up," said Federation of American Scientists President Henry Kelly, a physicist who testified this month at a Senate hearing on dirty bombs. Such a bomb detonated in a large city could render several blocks uninhabitable, he added.
There are literally hundreds of places where terrorists could obtain material for such a bomb, including former dumping grounds for medical waste in this country. But the recent discoveries in the former Soviet Union have further heightened international concerns about the possibility of nuclear theft. The RTGs in particular offer high concentrations of radioactivity with minimal controls -- and sometimes no controls, according to officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations.
"After the Soviet Union broke up so abruptly, the newly formed nations had no use for these things and no infrastructure," said Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokeswoman in Vienna. "They didn't have the means or even the information to locate, recover and dispose of them."
The IAEA classifies the Soviet RTGs as "orphaned" nuclear sources and has called for a major international effort to find them and lock them up. "They are a problem, from the point of view of terrorism," Fleming said. But she added: "Since we can't find them, presumably it would be hard for terrorists to find them as well."
RTGs are self-contained power sources that convert radioactive energy into electricity. Compact and relatively small -- Soviet models are between two and four feet in length and weigh between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds -- they are ideal for remote areas with little access to traditional fuels. The Soviets are known to have built more than 300 of the devices, most of them to power navigational beacons along arctic shipping lanes.
The U.S. government also built RTGs; some were used to power spacecraft, but at least 10 of the devices were installed at remote military listening posts in Alaska in the 1960s and '70s. After a brush fire threatened one of the devices in 1992, the Air Force began replacing them with diesel-powered generators.
In Soviet-made RTGs, the device's core typically is a flashlight-size capsule of strontium 90, surrounded by thick lead to absorb the radiation. When the lead cladding is intact, the generator is essentially harmless. But if the shielding were missing or cracked, someone standing nearby would receive a fatal dose of radiation within hours, IAEA officials said.
It was the strontium core that the Georgian woodcutters discovered in December while working in a remote forest in the northwestern region of Abkhazia. According to IAEA officials, the metal cylinder caught the men's attention because its heat had melted the surrounding snow. Oblivious to the risk, the men took the device back to their campsite.
Within hours the men suffered severe skin burns and internal organ damage. Nearly three months later, two of them are still critically ill in hospitals in Moscow and Paris, while the third has recovered.
Last month, an international team led by the IAEA recovered the strontium core and a sister device that had been abandoned in the same area. Even though special one-ton lead shields were constructed for the recovery effort, the workers were allowed to approach the cores for only 40 seconds at a time. The cores were trucked to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where they are being temporarily stored along with four others that have been recovered since 1998.
Still far from clear, the IAEA says, is how the cores ended up in the woods -- or how the Georgian government eventually will dispose of them. According to the IAEA, Georgian officials are convinced that more remain unaccounted for.
"Based on inventories, we think there are two more," Fleming said. "And there is some information that suggests still other sources in Georgia."
In other corners of the former Soviet Union, the fact that officials know the location of the devices has done little to ease local safety concerns.
The Russian government commission that visited Chukotka in 1997 set out in ships to inspect 85 radiothermal generators believed to be scattered along the region's northern coast. The officials were unable to reach about a third of the devices because of harsh terrain and bad weather. But of the 52 RTGs inspected, nearly half no longer functioned, and only three had any sort of fencing or protection.
The commission's report describes six of the devices as heavily damaged and leaking potentially lethal amounts of radiation. One of the generators was nearly buried in frozen mud, it said, a second was lying in water and at least one could not be located.
"This lack of control means that it is entirely within the realm of possibility that . . . one or several RTGs might have been lost," said the report, signed by the province's chief health inspector, G.B. Lebedev, and chief inspector, Yuri Skobelev.
The generators had long sparked concern among local health officials and international wildlife groups worried about the potential for radiation leaks. But even before the Sept. 11 attacks, environmentalists who visited the region expressed concern about the apparent lack of security for the devices.
"It was just sitting in a wooden hutch -- I could have walked right up to it," said David Kleine, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Alaska field office, who passed within a few yards of one of the generators during a 1991 Bering Sea trip.
Still, there is an enormous difference between finding an abandoned generator and successfully carting it away to create a weapon, nuclear experts say. IEER President Arjun Makhijani said an amateur tampering with such a device would put his own life in peril. But for someone with proper training and a bent for terror, the generators could be a means for inflicting significant harm.
"If you don't know what you are doing, it will kill you first," Makhijani said. "But if you know what you're doing, it will do an extreme amount of damage."
We've come a long way since the old firecracker in a doogy-doo.

Storm experts make cloud vanish (BBCNEWS)
01 August 01
Storm experts in the US have made a cloud vanish from the sky for the first time.
They achieved the feat by sprinkling a water-absorbing powder over the cloud, making it disappear from sight and weather station radar screens. They hope the powder will one day dry up deadly hurricanes and tropical storms.
"It is the moisture that gives hurricanes their strength," says Peter Cordani who runs Dyn-O-Mat, the company that makes the product. "In the case of a huge hurricane, we would not be trying to soak it up altogether. But what we would do is break it up and reduce its strength and killing potential. We think we can save lives with this product and we are very happy about that."
The powder could also banish rain over open-air events and sports fixtures. Cordani and his team hope to get government permission to tackle a hurricane or tropical storm in the coming season.
In their latest experiment, large military aircraft scattered the powder through a storm cloud 1600 metres long and over 4000 metres deep. It took about 4000 kilograms of powder to soak up the moisture from the cloud, making it virtually disappear. "I had calls from a weather tower and even from Channel 5 news in Miami, saying that they had seen the cloud literally disappear off the radar screen. They confirmed that there had been a tall build-up and the next moment it was gone," Cordani says.
Each grain of the powder, called Dyn-O-Gel, is capable of absorbing 2000 times its weight in moisture, condensation and rain. Each molecule of powder can hold several molecules of water. The wet powder becomes a gel.
The shape of the grains is also crucial for maximum absorption of moisture. "If you were to look at a grain under a microscope, it would look rather like a cornflake," says Cordani. "This means that they flutter back and forth like a snowflake as they pass through the cloud, taking up as much moisture as possible. The first polymer we made just went straight down through the cloud," he says.
Once the polymer turns into a gel, it becomes heavier and falls to earth. The gel dissolves when it hits salt water, so if possible, storm clouds will be tackled over the ocean.
But the gel should still be safe if it falls over land. "Much of the gel evaporates on the way down, and it is biodegradable and not hazardous to the environment or anybody's health," says Cordani. The company spent $1 million on the test, and hopes to sell their powder to the US government.
The same powder can also be used to help make rain. The tiny flakes help bind rain drops together, stopping them from evaporating as quickly. Once the powder is turned into a water-laden gel you could also use it to fight fires by dousing the flames.
So, can we have sunny days whenever we like? Maybe. "If there was a 50-mile storm front moving in, we could only put holes in it. It would just keep coming," says Cordani. But "if there was a cloud threatening a sports fixture, it would be possible to get rid of it".

Are Chemtrails Causing Drought? (Common Cause Medical Research Foundation via Rense)
3-12-2
Drought is becoming widespread throughout the United States and in other parts of the world. Adverse events of all types are increasing. Evidence leads us to the conclusion that all is not coincidence. It appears that corporations and certain factions of the government are playing a large role in the creation and coverup of many of these adverse events.
This is supposed to be an article on drought and it's possible causes and what we can do to hopefully turn it all around. However, I feel it is important to share with you some brief insights I've gained from others, which are vital in overcoming the current desperate situation of our world.
Citizens understandably want to know why their government and or certain corporations would want to perhaps cause a drought, crash the economy, keep us in a perpetual state of war, take away many of our rights, create diseases in order to profit from treatments (instead of cures) or damage the environment in other ways that would also eventually affect the perpetrators and their own families. These are not easy questions to answer especially for those of us who can not comprehend this destructive, power hungry mindset that seems so alien and nonsensical.
Fear, greed, hate and a hunger for power are some of the motives behind many of these negative actions. We need to understand these basic causes of disharmony in our world and do our best not to feed into it ourselves. We must not react with those same qualities, which will only increase the negativity.
We do need to uncover and expose the evil but then we need to respond with Firmness, Wisdom, Understanding and Love. To some of you this statement may sound whimpy but the reality is that Spiritual Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
I have been observing the chemtrail phenomenon for a couple of years now, here in the northeast. There obviously appears to be more than one purpose for the spraying but we will concentrate on the weather modification aspect.
According to the mainstream media, the drought in the northeast began in the fall of 2001. I have been observing the sky every day since I saw my first chemtrails in 1999 and have begun to notice a basic or general pattern of spraying. The pattern is sometimes altered by several days of cloud cover but usually you can pretty much count on the following. One to two days before a front is scheduled to pass through, heavy spraying will occur.
Total cloud cover is often the obvious goal. When the front arrives , one will many times hear low flying jets above the cloud cover. We end up recieving absolutely no rain (even though predicted) or a very negligable amount. When the clouds break up, the air will usually have a definite opaque white cast to it, unlike the more transparent quality of fog. Many chemtrail investigators have evidence that barium salts make up part of the mixture being emitted from these jets. Barium is a dessicant and absorbs moisture. The barium and probably other chemicals may also be used in conjunction with HAARP, which is a joint U.S Air Force and Navy project, to essentially control the weather.
At this point I would like to include an excerpt from "Chemtrails" Implications Part ll...
"Tommy Farmer, a former engineering technician with Raytheon Missle Systems, has been tracking patterns of jet contrails for more than a year. After repeatedly observing aircraft spraying particulates in front of and into cloud systems, Farmer is fairly certain the contrail phenomena is one part of a military weather modification weapons system. He notes that because the chemical contrails allow much more moisture to form inside the cloud systems, severe localized storms result from the aerial seeding while surrounding areas that have surrendered their moisture to the storm cells, experience drought.
The huge Xs being traced by formations of tanker jets in the sky can be tracked by satellite and coordinated with the crossed beams of ionospheric heaters(HAARP) to heat the upper atmosphere, changing it's temperature and density and enhancing the storm's effects.
Based in Gakon, Alaska, this unclassified joint U.S Air Force and Navy project known as the High Altitude Auroral Research Project (HAARP) has for the past several years been using phased array antennas to steer powerful beams of tightly-focused radio waves "to stimulate" heat and steer sections of the upper atmosphere.
Awarded in 1985 to MIT physicist, Bernard Eastlund, HAARP's commercial patent claims that directed energy beams of more than one billion watts can be used for altering the upper atmosphere wind patterns using plumes of atmospheric particles as a lens or focusing device to disturb the weather thousands of miles away. In an interview with this reporter, Eastlund admitted "I had looked at using this intense beam, which can be angled, to do some experiments in terms of guiding the jet stream, moving it from one spot to another."
-end of excerpt
Storm Enhancement, Storm Modification and Drought Inducement, are listed objectives of an AirForce research study entitled "Weather as a Force Multiplier." The ultimate goal was stated as "owning the weather by the year 2025."
One will almost never see trails being formed the day after the front passes through. As a rule, in our area, one to 2 days of clear skies follow, sometimes 3. Then the whole cycle begins again with a storm predicted to pass through within a couple of days.
Sometimes this pattern is broken by light spraying, especially around the rising and setting sun. On some days the jets play "connect the clouds" , for what purpose is anyone's guess. Our winter of 2001/2002 has been very bizarre, consisitng of unusual severe drought and extremely warm temperatures. I get the general impression from the media that they expect the drought to continue and perhaps cause major problems.
To me, it is reminiscent of the biological warfare media propaganda. My personal gut feeling is that they are making a continued drought sound plausible so that when farmers begin to lose their land, water rationing begins and possible famine ensues, it will seem as though it was all a natural occurrence. I can not prove any of this and I do not want to be an alarmist but I feel we must follow our intuitions and spread the word of this possibility before it is too late. We cannot wait for firm evidence to begin our investigation....and it is OUR investigation. We cannot depend and never should have placed so much dependance on our government to solve all our problems. This is a very dangerous practice.
There is an excellent article by Dr. Vandana Shiva entitled "Monsanto's Expanding Monopolies". I would like to share a couple of excerpts. "Over the past few years, Monsanto, a chemical firm, has positioned itself as an agricultural company through control over seed-the first link in the food chain. Monsanto now wants to control water, the very basis of life."
"Monsanto is seeing a new business opportunity because of the emerging water crisis. As it states in it's strategy paper "first, we believe that discontinuities (either major policy changes or major trendline breaks in resource quality or quantity), are likely, particularly in the area of water and we will be well positioned via these businesses to profit even more significantly when these discontinuities occur." Thus the crisis of pollution and depletion of water resources is viewed by Monsanto as a business opportunity."
Is it possible that the emerging water crisis is being caused artificially? I believe the answer could be yes but we need more investigation into this issue, on a massive scale. I have been trying to determine what would be the best course of action. Many of us have already tried contacting our legislators, government agencies, universities and the mainstream media but with very minimal results. I asked myself who would be the most affected by the drought, be the most concerned, and be the most likely to join together to form coalitions. I came up with the obvious conclusion.....anyone whose livelihood centers around the use of water. Agricultural and livestock growers came to mind first. I'm sure there are many other businesses that you could come up with.
I decided to make packets consisting of chemtrail photos, congressional bills, documents, patents, newspaper articles, etc. and bring them around to several large growers in our area.
I have just begun doing this, so I don't have any results to report on yet except the fact that I was always well recieved and that a couple of orchard owners I talked to, knew immediately what I was referring to when I mentioned the jet trails that don't dissipate....after all many of these people are outside all day long. The managers and owners said they would pass the information on to their partners and wanted to know how they could get in touch with me if needed. They seemed very grateful for the information. In the past I have tried to inform the general public about chemtrails and have had mixed success. I found that I'm getting more consistently good responses when I have specific information on the specific problem, drought/chemtrails and take it all to the appropriate people/businesses that would be affected and do it all with a desire to help.
I'm trying not to appear sensationalistic about the topic and instead I'm trying to remain calm and present the facts. We do have to admit that we don't have all the answers and that we need to work together to solve this. I mention that if perhaps they take the time to observe for themselves and if they then notice a correlation between the spraying and the weather conditions then they may want to contact the other growers in the area, that I have already spoken to, and perhaps form some type of coalition for the purpose of further investigation or legal action.
I tend to be impatient and when the owners weren't available and I tried giving all the information to the workers to pass on to the owners. I was told by several workers that I should wait till the owners are present and if necessary, make an appointment, otherwise the materials will not be taken seriously. This is a very good suggestion. Always speak with the owners/managers otherwise you may be wasting all your materials. Don't be shy about firmly asking to see the owner/manager. If drought appears like it may be an ongoing problem in your area and it's going to affect their bottom line, they will not feel like you are wasting their time. People are beginning to feel that something strange and different is going on and if you approach with the right motive in your heart, people will sense this.
You may want to explain the process involving media disinformation so that when it occurs they will not be swayed and will be able to discern the lies from the truth. When agendas are being uncovered those who are responsible may scurry to come up with alternate explanantions or even partial truths to cover up and confuse the public. Give them a few possible examples pertaining to the drought situation such as the President announcing that chemtrails are solely for the prevention of global warming.
Considering that Gorbachev and others in the One world Government crowd have declared that the environment and the global warming scenerio will be the cornerstone of the "New World Order", those you are informing will be aware and not be decieved when disinformation presents itself.
Another gem I heard recently was that we have much more pollution/particulates lately and these particulates are not allowing the rain to fall from the clouds (partial truth). The trend will be towards making the crisis seem to stem totally from unintentional unregulated pollution that will require global government restrictions.
Gorbachev has formed "Green Cross", an environmental think tank which has The "Earth Charter" as it's magna carta. He hopes the Earth Charter will rival the Ten Commandments and guide us into the new millenium. He speaks of nations losing sovereignty, giving way to international laws that will dictate common beliefs, values, standards and behavior and conform to the consensus of a group of leaders he has elected which he has termed The Council of the Wise or Global Brain Trust. Remember, the environmental crisis, whether real or promulgated, is intended to be the cornerstone or the fear inducing factor that will supposedly have us all begging for the protection offered by world government.
Now is the time to act and inform. We can no longer afford the luxury of worrying what others will think of us. Working together can be a joyful and uplifting experience. When I go to others with the right motive and attitude of thought, most people are very kind and receptive. If any of you have any ideas to share, you are welcome to e-mail me.
Below is a partial list of items I have included in my packet I give out to the businesses.
1. Individual chemtrail photos or an 11x17 collage of your best photos. I found that I can fit 7 or 8 photos, when trimmed, on this size paper and then have it color copied. This color copy machine is at the same printers where I make my article copies.
2. Spotlight Article- http://www.rense.com/general4/chmmm.htm
3.Space Weapons (Chemtrail) Bill- http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c107query.html
4. Teller's Sunscreen - http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/981/teller.html
5. Monsanto article - http://www.vshiva.net/monsanto/water.htm
6. Climate Review - http://www.chooseclimate.org/cleng/part2.html
7.Carnicom Website - http://carnicom.com/contrails.htm Barium articles Particulate photos Visitor List of govt. agencies and corporations that are apparently interested in chemtrails. Any other pertinent articles
8. Powder Contrail Generator patent
9. Welsbach Seeding patent
10. Chemtrails Implications Part ll - http://www.ettracker.com/index-9.html

"The sprayings have become much more blatant now. I wake up around 6:00 to clear skies and by 8:00 the sky is discolored with a nasty haze. This picture was taken near King of Prussia Mall in southeastern PA about 30 minutes from Philadelphia."

STAR WARS EPISODE TWO: ATTACK OF THE CLONES early cut review (HarryKnowles)
I saw Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones hours ago. The ‘how’ of that will be a thing of mystery buried in a passed piece of paper from my book signing with a hotel, a room number and a time listed upon it. You don’t want to know about that room or the person(s) in that room, you want to know about Episode Two.
Jar Jar Binks. Jar Jar has a 15 second StepInFetchIt shuffle speak routine he does as he goes to first let Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker into the Amidala’s quarters that is so offensively awful, that it will not only make you recoil in horror, but it will remind you of all of the worst aspects of his character from THE PHANTOM MENACE. I wanted to burn the film, destroy, maim and murder it at this stage. I was steeling myself from the impending incompetence, the horror of my childhood being molested. I was prepared to have a very bad time.
I found myself not liking Anakin Skywalker at all, he’s a punk spoiled brat… A snotty nosed ego trip, that angry evil high school football quarterback that wants the head cheerleader. He whines like a Mark Hamill squealing about going to Toshi Station to get some power converters. There is much anger in him. He’s impulsive, conflicted, out of control and a mass murderer. Everytime I saw him and Natalie Portman together, I wanted to tell her to run, fly you fool. But am I not supposed to feel that way?
So did George Lucas drop the ball? Did he rape our childhood? Has he turned into nothing more than flannel wearing toy salesman without a soul or an eye for storytelling anymore? Was I disappointed to such a state that I wanted to yell and scream and break my original 12 inch Boba Fett and defecate upon it in a ritualistic purging of all that was once sacred to my childhood?
To answer all of those questions…. THANK GOD NO!!! Lucas succeeds with the film beyond my wildest dreams.
I was scared and thrilled to be watching Episode 2. The entire time I was in that hotel room, I was convinced that agents of Lucasfilm were going to knock down the doors and I knew I was being set up for a fall. I mean, it isn’t possible to see STAR WARS early. I know that, but there I was watching it. Listening to the sounds of drunk SXSW revelers falling into the door outside.
After about 20 minutes of that awareness everything but the film ceased to exist. The lights in the room dimmed in my mind. The person(s) in the room shrank like Scott Carey into the microverse. Everything about me was concentrating upon the film. The movie was not complete. There were moments where the effects were quite rough, but the work that was finished, was beyond reproach.
How do I explain the success of ATTACK OF THE CLONES? First, I must say that this film makes THE PHANTOM MENACE a better film. In fact, I would have to say that not only does it do that, but suddenly you will realize with horror, exactly why Jar Jar Binks is in the series at all. Upon first viewing, in less than ideal circumstances, I must say that I feel that this is by far the most entertaining Star Wars film to date. It may not have that innocent sense of wonder for the first film. It doesn’t have that sense of intimacy that EMPIRE STRIKES BACK had, or that film’s desperation. However, it also doesn’t have the trivial frivolity of JEDI or MENACE. ATTACK OF THE CLONES is a turning point in the saga. The point of no return.
I love this film desperately. I want to continually watch it for about a week with my best friends. I want to see it digitally projected with sternum shaking sound. I want to watch as friends discover the twists that Palpatine/Sidious/Dooku have in store for us. I want to have the conversations about what this all means, the speculative conversations about how these elements will play out in the final chapter of the prequels.
What is great about the film?
Read on....

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