2002-04-30
(PRAVDA)
THE MAP OF "THE CREATOR"
A find of Bashkir scientists contraries to traditional notions of human history: stone stabs which is 120 million years covered with the relief map of Ural Region.
This seems to be impossible. Scientists of Bashkir State University have found indisputable proofs of an ancient highly developed civilization’s existence. The question is about a great plate found in 1999, with picture of the region done according to an unknown technology. This is a real relief map. Today’s military has almost similar maps. The map contains civil engineering works: a system of channels with a length of about 12,000 km, weirs, powerful dams. Not far from the channels, diamond-shaped grounds are shown, whose destination is unknown. The map also contains some inscriptions. Even numerous inscriptions. At first, the scientists thought that was Old Chinese language. Though, it turned out that the subscriptions were done in a hieroglyphic-syllabic language of unknown origin. The scientists never managed to read it…
“The more I learn the more I understand that I know nothing,” – the doctor of physical and mathematical science, professor of Bashkir State University, Alexandr Chuvyrov admits. Namely Chuvyrov made that sensational find. Already in 1995, the professor and his post-graduate student from China Huan Hun decided to study the hypothesis of possible migration of Old Chinese population to the territory of Siberia and Ural. In an expedition to Bashkiria, they found several rock carvings done in Old Chinese language. These finds confirmed the hypothesis of Chinese migrants. The subscriptions were read. They mostly contained information about trade bargains, marriage and death registration.
Though, during the searches, notes dated the 18th century were found in archives of Ufa governor-general. They reported about 200 unusual stone stabs which were situated not far from the Chandar village, Nurimanov Region. Chuvyrov and his colleague at once decided that stabs could be connected with Chinese migrants. Archive notes also reported that in 17th-18th centuries, expeditions of Russian scientists who investigated Ural Region had studied 200 white stabs with signs and patterns, while in early 20th century, archaeologist A.Schmidt also had seen some white stabs in Bashkiria. This made the scientist start the search. In 1998, after having formed a team of his students, Chuvyrov launched the work. He hired a helicopter, and the first expedition carried a flying around of the places where the stabs were supposed to be. Though, despite all efforts, the ancient stabs were not found. Chuvyrov was very upset and even thought the stabs were just a beautiful legend.
The luck was unexpected. During one of Chuvyrov’s trips to the village, ex-chairman of the local agricultural council, Vladimir Krainov, came to him (apropos, in the house of Krainov’s father, archaelogist Schmidt once staid) and said: “Are you searching for some stone stabs? I have a strange stab in my yard.” “At first, I did not took that report seriously, - Chuvyrov told. – Though, I decided to go to that yard to see it. I remember this day exactly: July 21, 1999. Under the porch of the house, the stab with some dents lied. The stab was so heavy that we together could not take it out. So I went to the city of Ufa, to ask for help.”
In a week, work was launched in Chandar. After having dug out the stab, the searches were stroke with its size: it was 148 cm high, 106 cm wide and 16 cm thick. While it weighed at least one ton. The master of the house made special wooden rollers, so the stab was rolled out from the hole. The find was called “Dashka’s stone” (in honour of Alexandr Chuvyrov’s granddaughter born the day before it) and transported to the university for investigation. After the stab was cleaned of earth, the scientists could not entrust to their eyes... “At first sight, - Chuvyrov sais, - I understood that was not a simple stone piece, but a real map, and not a simple map, but a three-dimensional. You can see it yourself.”
“How did we manage to identify the place? At first, we could not imagine the map was so ancient. Happily, relief of today’s Bashkiria has not changed so much within millions of years. We could identify Ufa Height, while Ufa Canyon is the main point of our proofs, because we carried out geological studies and found its track where it must be according to the ancient map. Displacement of the canyon happened because of tectonic stabs which moved from East. The group of Russian and Chinese specialists in the field of cartography, physics, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and Old Chinese language managed to precisely find out that the stab contains the map of Ural region, with rivers Belya, Ufimka, Sutolka,” – Alexandr Chuvyrov said while showing the lines on the stone to the journalists. – You can see Ufa Canyon – the break of the earth’s crust, stretched out from the city of Ufa to the city of Sterlitimak. At the moment, Urshak River runs over the former canyon.” The map is done on a scale 1 : 1.1 km.
Alexandr Chuvyrov, being physicist, has got into the habit of entrusting only to results of investigation. While today there are such facts.
Geological structure of the stab was determined: it cosists of three levels. The base is 14 cm chick, made of the firmest dolomite. The second level is probably the most interesting, “made” of diopside glas. The technology of its treatement is not known to modern science. Actually, the picture is marked on this level. While the third level is 2 mm thick and made of calcium porcelain protecting the map from external impact.
“It should be noticed, - the professor said, - that the relief has not been manually made by an ancient stonecutter. It is simply impossible. It is obvious that the stone was machined.” X-ray photographs confirmed that the stab was of artificial origin and has been made with some precision tools.
At first, the scientists supposed that the ancient map could have been made by the ancient Chinese, because of vertical inscriptions on the map. As well known, vertical literature was used in Old Chinese language before 3rd century. To check his supposition, professor Chuvyrov visited Chinese empire library. Within 40 minutes he could spend in the library according to the permission he looked through several rare books, though no one of them contained literature similar to that one on the stab. After the meeting with his colleagues from Hunan university, he completely gave up the version about “Chinese track.” The scientist concluded that porcelain covering the stab had never been used in China. Although all the efforts to decipher the inscriptions were fruitless, it was found out that the literature had hieroglyphic-syllabic character. Chuvyrov, however, states he has deciphered one sign on the map: it signifies latitude of today’s city of Ufa.
The longer the stab was studied, the more mysteries appeared. On the map, a giant irrigative system could be seen: in addition to the rivers, there are two 500-metre-wide channel systems, 12 dams, 300-500 metres wide, approximately 10 km long and 3 km deep each. The dams most likely helped in turning water in either side, while to create them over 1 quadrillion cubic metres of earth was shifted. In comparison with that irrigative system, Volga-Don Channel looks like a scratch on the today’s relief. As a physicist, Alexandr Chuvyrov supposes that now mankind can build only a small part of what is pictured on the map. According to the map, initially, Belaya River had an artificial river-bad.
It was difficult to determine even an approximate age of the stab. At first, radiocarbonic analysis was carried out, afterwards levels of stab were scanned with uranium chronometer, though the investigations showed different results and the age of the stab remained unclear. While examining the stone, two shells were found on its surface. The age of one of them – Navicopsina munitus of Gyrodeidae family - is about 500 million years, while of the second one – Ecculiomphalus princeps of Ecculiomphalinae subfamily - is about 120 million years. Namely that age was accepted as a “working version.” “The map was probably created at the time when the Earth’s magnetic pole situated in the today’s area of Franz Josef Land, while this was exactly 120 million years ago, - professor Chuvyrov says. – The map we have is beyond of traditional perception of mankind and we need a long time to get used to it. We have got used to our miracle. At first we thought that the stone was about 3,000 years. Though, that age was gradually growing, till we identified the shells ingrained in the stone to sign some objects. Though, who could guarantee that the shell was alive while being ingrained in the map? The map’s creator probably used a petrified find.”
What could be the destination of the map? That is probably the most interesting thing. Materials of the Bashkir find were already investigated in Centre of Historical Cartography in Visconsin, USA. The Americans were amazed. According to them, such three-dimensional map could have only one destination – a navigational one, while it could be worked out only through aerospace survey. Moreover, namely now in the US, work is being carried out at creation of world three-dimensional map like that. Though, the Americans intend to complete the work only to 2010. The question is that while compiling such three-dimensional map, it is necessary to work over too many figures. “Try to map at least a mountain! – Chuvyrov says. – The technology of compiling such maps demands super-power computers and aerospace survey from the Shuttle.” So, who then did created this map? Chuvyrov, while speaking about the unknown cartographers, is wary: “I do not like talks about some UFO and extraterrestrial. Let us call the author of the map simply – the creator.”
It looks like that who lived and built at that time used only air transport means: there is no ways on the map. Or they, probably, used water ways. There is also an opinion, that the authors of the ancient map did not live there at all, but only prepared that place for settlement through draining the land. This seems to be the most probable version, though nothing could be stated for the time being. Why not to assume that the authors belonged to a civilization which existed earlier?
Latest investigations of the map bring one sensation after another. Now, the scientists are sure of the map being only a fragment of a big map of the Earth. According to some hypothesis, there were totally 348 fragments like that. The other fragments could be probably somewhere near there. In outskirts of Chandar, the scientists took over 400 samples of soil and found out that the whole map had been most likely situated in the gorge of Sokolinaya Mountain (Falcon Mountain). Though, during the glacial epoch it was tore to pieces. But if the scientists manage to gather the “mosaic,” the map should have an approximate seize of 340 x 340 m. After having studied the archive materials, Chuvyrov ascertained approximate place where four pieces could be situated: one could lie under one house in Chandar, the other – under the house of merchant Khasanov, the third – under one of the village baths, the fourth – under the bridge’s pier of the local narrow-gauge railway.
In the meanwhile, Bashkir scientists send out information about their find to different scientific centres of the world; in several international congresses, they have already given reports on the subject: The Civil Engineering Works Map of an Unknown Civilization of South Ural.”
The find of Bashkir scientists has no analogues. With only one exclusion. When the research was at its height, a small stone – chalcedony - got to professor Chuvyrov’s table, containing a similar relief. Probably somebody, who saw the stab wanted to copy the relief. Though, who and why?
A Missouri cave believed to be more than 50-thousand years old was vandalized late Friday night. While the cave is believed to have been around since the Ice Age, it was not discovered until the last year. The county hired a team of researchers to look over the cave. They were the only ones allowed inside. "Makes you sick, saw manhole cover off and thought oh no! I thought we did everything we could to protect it, " said Dr. Ken Thomson, an SMS geologist.
Vandals broke through a manhole and destroyed two gates. Once inside the cave they carved their initials and a marijuana pot leaf into the wall. Authorities say the pristine, underground world is now a crime scene. "We found evidence vandals caused a significant amount of damage to this historical sight,"said Greene County Deputy Dave Holloway.
Saturday geologists spent the day cleaning up the graffiti and trying to restore it to its original condition.
The location of the cave was suppose to be kept a secret. Greene county officials say a Springfield newspaper blew its cover this week by publishing which street the cave is on. " I guess they are more interested in making money, but have really created a problem for Greene County," said Presiding Greene County Commissioner David Conrod. Still county officials aren't sure how the vandals found the cave.
Geologists will continue to use buffers to grind out the vandalism and are confident the drawings will eventually be removed from the rock.
(Hypothesis by Jared Freedman)
EXCEPRTS:The Sun is a complex system. It is a nuclear dynamo that baths the Earth in a wide spectrum of energy. Most of the energy strikes the Earth as sunlight and heat. It is estimated that on a normal day, 95% of the energy is transmitted this way. The other 5% strike the Earth as a stream of charged particles, called the Solar Wind, and is responsible for all Space Weather.
The Earth is also a complex system. It has a rotating iron core that generates an intense magnetic field, usually 50 times stronger than the field created by the Sun. At the source, the Sun’s field is much stronger than the Earth’s field, but the magnetic force, like gravity, decreases in power with the inverse square law. By the time the field has reached the Earth, the force has decreased dramatically.
Unlike the Earth's magnetic field which changes slowly, the Sun's magnetic field can change quite rapidly. Small bits of field can change over a few minutes. During solar flares a whole section of the Sun's magnetic field can be disrupted in minutes or hours. For example, on April 14, 1994, a large-scale eruptive event occurred which resulted in a cloud of solar material weighing 1 billion tons moving towards the Earth at a speed of over 1 million miles per hour.
There exists a larger and more forceful form of solar storm than we have ever witnessed in recorded history. These events, for lack of a better term, I will call Solar Typhoons. It is my belief, based upon historical evidence, myth, and my current research into Solar-Terrestrial interaction, that these occur on very long and regular cycles, perhaps in the thousands of years.
It is important to note, that Solar Typhoons will not in every case cause undue impact on the Earth. If a coronal mass ejection rated at 10 billion tons, moving at 4.5 million miles per hour where to be emitted from the Sun, it wouldn’t mean that much if it happened on the side of the Sun facing away from us. There has to be an alignment of the solar disturbance, and the Earth. Additionally, the Earth will pass through most disturbances fairly quickly, as it orbits around the sun at approximately 66,000 miles per hour. Even if the Earth passed through a mass one million miles wide, it would be behind the Earth in less than a day.
If the timing of the Earth pole reversal co-insides with a powerful Solar Typhoon, then the Earth’s core will heat enough to cause turbulence within the mantle, and eventually cause the entire Earth to expand by a measurable about, and this expansion will center around the magnetic poles as the highest amount of inducted heat will collect there.
Final Cornerstone:
When the Earth expands due to increased core temperature, seismic shock waves emanate from the increased mantle turbulence. Increased heat coupled with the shock waves act as a jackhammer that breaks up the crystalline structure of the Moho. The Moho turns semi-liquid, and acts as a lubricant for the rough underside of the crust, and the smooth semi-liquid of the mantle. With the expanded poles, the shape of the Earth becomes more spherical, allowing the crust to slip due to gravitational forces, inertia, Earth wobble, and mass imbalance. Once out of the "Solar Typhoon", the core will start to cool again through thermal displacement and through the creation of a stronger magnetosphere due to increased core rotation and energy. The Earth’s crust will move around the mantle until the core cools enough to allow the polar expansion to subside and the Moho to revert to a crystalline state again. This is the primary mechanism for massive crust displacement and displacement stopping. As is most likely apparent, this would be violent and cataclysmic for all life forms on the planet due to earthquakes, volcanoes, climate shift, disrupted weather, floods, and famine.
Conclusions
Ancient man knew all of the information that I have described in this article. They knew that there was no permanence, no stability, and no solid foundation for the Earth. They knew that all they built would one day be swept away, as it had many times before. Nevertheless, they wanted things to be different next time; they wanted us to be prepared. So in the end, what do so many of these lost and forgotten monuments mean? What message were they trying to convey? In my opinion, beyond all the math, astronomy, and geophysics, the message is a simple one: “We were here before you, now we are not. Learn from us and remember, the same can and most likely will happen to you.”
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Passengers were pulled from a Florida-bound US Airways flight after they aroused suspicion among federal authorities, who ordered the plane to return to Philadelphia, the FBI said.
The FBI said the passengers were engaged ``suspicious activity,'' but did not elaborate. They were taken off the flight Sunday without incident and questioned by the FBI, spokeswoman Linda Vizi said. Bomb-sniffing dogs found no explosives, she said.
``Certain individuals on that plane were engaged in a pattern of suspicious activity,'' said Vizi.
Federal air marshals contacted the FBI about the passengers, Vizi said, and federal authorities in Washington, D.C., decided to make US Airways Flight 335 return to Philadelphia.
The plane carrying 134 passengers landed in Philadelphia at 7:05 p.m., less than an hour after takeoff.
``We landed and we're sitting around almost two hours. Finally, they said the FBI's coming on the plane and that's when the wave of emotion hits everyone,'' passenger Jack Clark told KYW-TV.
Passengers said four or five people had been acting suspiciously. Clark said a man sitting next to him was among those taken off the plane.
``He looked very suspicious. He was talking, but not to anyone in particular. He kept talking down into his chest,'' said Clark, of Blue Bell, Pa.
The remaining passengers on the flight went through security screening a second time and were sent to Orlando. The passengers whose actions were deemed suspicious had not been charged as of early Monday, Vizi said.
No other flights were delayed, airport spokesman Mark Pesce said.
An airline representative referred questions to the FBI.
AP Tuesday, April 30, 2002
PHILADELPHIA
The FBI told passengers on a flight forced to return after takeoff that their plane was rerouted because several passengers of Middle Eastern descent had purchased one-way tickets for cash that day, passengers said Monday.
An FBI spokeswoman, Linda Vizi, would not confirm the passengers' accounts but said the suspicious passengers on the Florida-bound US Airways flight on Sunday were interviewed and released early Monday without being charged. "We were able to determine their travel plans were legitimate and their identities were legitimate," Vizi said.
Glenn Mattes, 48, and Jack Clark, 55, said FBI agents also told them and their fellow passengers that two other planes - one in Houston and the other in Baltimore - were grounded because passengers of Middle Eastern descent had bought one-way tickets that day for cash.
APRIL 29
LA PLATA, Md. (AP) — Tornado-ravaged cities from Missouri to Maryland picked up the pieces Monday after an unusually wide and potent swath of thunderstorms weaved their way through the eastern half of the nation, killing at least six people.
The toll rose today to three dead from the devastating tornado that tore across Southern Maryland on Sunday evening, causing what one official estimated might top $100 million in damage.
Nearly 100 people remained in local hospitals, with about a dozen in serious condition. Search-and-rescue crews continued their work, although a spokeswoman for the Charles County Sheriff's Office said they did not think anyone remained trapped in the rubble of what had been downtown La Plata less than 24 hours earlier.
This afternoon, the National Weather Service said the tornado was an F5, the most catastrophic rating on the scale for measuring tornadoes. The winds associated with an F5 storm range from 261 miles per hour up to 318 mph. The storm had initially been classified an F4.
Sunday's twister cut a 24-mile swath east after crossing the Potomac River, reaching into Calvert County with winds that may have exceeded 250 miles per hour. Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) declared a state of emergency in both counties. A bevy of state and federal officials toured the destruction throughout the morning, including Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who said the damage might exceed $100 million. Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick surveyed the damage to a Catholic school as well. As of noon, more than 3,000 homes remained without power.
But the greatest havoc was in Charles, where as many as 16,000 buildings may have been damaged, according to Mike Zabko, director of the local American Red Cross chapter. The chapter's office on La Grange Avenue was among the many downtown structures decimated.
Indeed, blocks of La Plata looked as if they had been bombed, buildings reduced to tangled wooden shards and massive mounds of debris.
Sheriff Frederick Davis surveyed the scene from a state police helicopter. "It looked like TV scenes of Beirut," he said. "It was that devastating."
Two men and one woman were killed when they were trapped during the storm.
William G. Erickson Jr., 51, of Waldorf, was in town with his wife to check on their nearly completed new house on Martha Hawkins Place. They sought shelter there as the tornado ripped through the neighborhood. Rescuers took Susan Erickson to Prince George's Hospital Center with serious injuries.
Another man was found dead in his car along Route 301 near Route 6. Authorities did not immediately release his name.
In Prince Frederick, in Calvert County, 78-year-old Margaret Alvey died when the tornado pushed her house off its foundation and down an incline, crushing it. Her husband, George Alvey, was in critical condition at Washington Hospital Center, police said.
Despite tornado watch alerts that the National Weather Service began issuing in mid-afternoon, many people said they had known nothing about the impending danger.
Ronald Johnson's mother called to tell him to be careful. "I stepped outside, and I noticed that the wind was blowing really hard. And then I saw this giant piece of building coming at me," he recounted.
"I ran inside, got under my work bench and that was it. It took about a minute and a half," said Johnson, a union carpenter. He was lucky, though. His two-story Victorian lost its roof and several walls but was still standing.
Fifteen-year-old Mikey Pride and a girlfriend were home alone, making quesadillas in the kitchen. They felt the air pressure change--"we looked out the front window and saw houses falling apart," Mikey said--and tried to run for the furnace room.
They never made it and hid, terrified, under a baby grand piano in the living room as the roof began collapsing.
A National Weather Service meteorologist said the tornado may have been a category F4, one notch below the worst designation possible, with winds reaching at least 250 miles per hour. James P. Travers, who is in charge of the service's Baltimore-Washington forecast office, said it was investigating reports that two twisters may have been on the ground in Calvert simultaneously.
"It definitely was a complex of tornadoes," he said.
On Nov. 9, 1926, a powerful tornado, known as Maryland's most severe in more than 100 years, hit about five miles southwest of La Plata, leaving 14 people dead and 56 injured as it moved across Charles County.
Thu May 2, 2002
(Associated Press)
LONDON - Gaffe-prone Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II (news - web sites), told a joke about people with eating disorders and the blind on Thursday that seemed to surprise a crowd at a public appearance.
Philip was visiting Exeter Cathedral with his wife as part of her Golden Jubilee tour of Britain when he spotted blind woman Susan Edwards and her guide dog in the crowd waiting for the royal visitors.
"Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" he asked Edwards. Although she didn't seem to react, people standing nearby raised their eyebrows without saying anything.
Philip is renowned for his quips and forthright opinions. He has generated newspaper headlines several times by making unguarded comments while accompanying the queen on official royal tours around the world.
Give him a break, that's actually quite funny.
(about.com)
On Saturday April 20, a moderate earthquake (5.1 on the Richter Scale) occurred about 15 miles southwest of Plattsburgh, New York at 6:50 AM.
The earthquake was felt from Cleveland, Ohio to Maine and Baltimore, Maryland - and New York City.
Where they have occurred in the past, earthquakes will happen again. Also consider this:
• Most earthquakes in our area do not fall on or near known surface faults (e.g., the San Andreas Fault in California).
• Much of Manhattan Isle sits on a deep layer of soft soil and artificial fills overlying extremely hard rock. These soft pockets can amplify the shaking behaving as a fluid, and flow during an earthquake creating a magnitude greater than 6.0.
•Our city has one of the highest concentrations of high rise buildings per square foot than any other city, many of which were constructed without seismic building code guidelines. Earthquakes were generally not a design consideration before 1996.
• Brownstones are among the city's most earthquake-vulnerable structures in the city. These buildings would likely be reduced to rubble in a major quake.
• Yes, that was an earthquake that occurred back in New York City on January 17, 2001. It measured 2.4 on the Richter Scale. The epicenter was in midtown.
• The 125th Street Fault Zone runs southeasterly from 125th Street (near the Hudson River on the westside), through the NE corner of Central Park (near 110th Street and 5th Avenue), to East 96th Street near the East River.
• More than 400 earthquakes have occurred in New York State between 1730 and 1986 - the third highest earthquake activity of states east of the Mississippi River.
• The largest known New York State earthquake happened in the Cornwall-Massena area (near the US-Canadian border) on September 5, 1944. It had a Richter magnitude of about 6. Felt from Canada south to Maryland, and from Maine west to Indiana, it caused property damage estimated at $2 million.
• While California immediately comes to mind when we think about earthquakes, all 50 states and U.S. territories are vulnerable. The most violent have occurred in the central United States.
September 11th Environmental Hypocrisy
(ENS-News.com)
4-28-2
"Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest." -- Benjamin Franklin
Two key figures have resigned from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the last month. Both officials, the chief investigator for the EPA's Ombudsman Office and the Ombudsman himself, stated in their resignation letters that the EPA has covered up the existence of deadly pollution in the area of the destroyed World Trade Center towers in New York.
While this issue is debated, emergency workers who were sent to the scene and residents of Lower Manhattan are developing serious, and in some cases, life threatening health problems.
We don't even hear much about the area around the World Trade Center towers - or Ground Zero as it was dubbed by the news media - on the TV news or in the newspapers any longer. From the point of view of the corporate controlled mainstream media, the story is old. But for some firefighters and other personnel who worked or are still working at the scene, the trauma of the terrorist attacks has now become very personal as their own health is threatened.
At a New York public hearing in February, Hugh Kaufman, then chief investigator for the EPA's Ombudsman Office, told a group of scientists, residents, and small business owners that he believed the EPA was deliberately not testing the air quality in the World Trade Center area properly and covering up the reasons why.
"I believe EPA did not do that because they knew it would come up not safe and so they are involved in providing knowingly false information to the public about safety," Kaufman said at the hearing.
While the EPA continues to claim that the air around the site is safe, scores of rescue workers, cleanup crews, and residents are reporting respiratory problems. Many believe something in the air from the collapse of the towers is making them sick.
U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, whose district includes the site, said at a public meeting he called at the Federal Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, "It's remarkable. Either they have something to hide or they don't give a damn."
In November, 2001, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman issued an order to dissolve the ombudsman's position, an office created to give the public a forum for complaints about the agency 's actions. The Congressional order that established the office expired last fall, and she decided not to ask for renewal. In light of what we are now learning of the effects of the Bush administration on the EPA, it is no surprise that the public oversight function would be eliminated.
Many workers from FEMA, New York Fire Fighters and Urban Search and Rescue teams wore no protective masks.
The risks have been greatly magnified for many residents, rescue workers, and cleanup crews, because many did not wear any breathing protection sufficient to protect their lungs at ground zero and in the surrounding community. In fact, many day laborers, including large numbers of immigrants who spoke little or no English, were hired to clean up buildings covered with toxic dust.
We won't hear about their ailments on the TV evening news.
Not widely reported in the news media is the fact that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gathered data early on about the pollution levels at the site. The Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS), a scientific instrument designed to view the site in many different wavelengths, was flown on an aircraft by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA over the World Trade Center area on September 16, 18, 22, and 23, 2001.
A two person crew from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collected samples of dusts and debris from more than 35 localities within a distance of one kilometer from the World Trade Center site on the evenings of September 17 and 18, 2001. While not by any means a complete study, the data showed elevated levels of asbestos and many other pollutants, including the heavy metals, aluminum, chromium, antimony, molybdenum, and barium.
Government officials have tried to downplay the asbestos threat by claiming that mostly chrysotile asbestos, a form of the mineral considered to be less carcinogenic than other forms, was found. The USGS document describing the results of their tests points out that such a claim, "has not been universally accepted by the scientific community." But it is convenient politically.
What studies done to date will not show are the localized toxic clouds of multiple substances that have been formed as millions of pounds of chemical compounds from the debris combine in unexpected ways. Many rescue and cleanup workers feel they have become ill from these invisible toxic clouds. A reader of my weekly commentaries contacted me about her friend and colleague, a rescue worker from a fire department in another state who was ordered to the World Trade Center right after the disaster. She became progressively sicker soon after this work and has been shuttled from doctor to doctor.
A bone marrow aspiration revealed a huge level of toxic mercury in her system that could only have gotten there from an intense outside exposure. The only place she could have gotten such an exposure was at the World Trade Center.
Increased pressure inside her skull has developed, and she is having severe headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds. Her friend reported to me that, "She has a horrible rash all over her body. She has horrible cramps in her legs and back. Her lung capacity is greatly diminished and she has had major changes in her vision, and was told she is going blind. The government doctor who was sent to treat her told her to take a six month leave of absence and get her life in order because in six months she would no longer be able to perform her duties as a firefighter."
The supervisor of this 12 year veteran rescue worker told her "all of this medical testing is fine, as long as it does not get in the way of you doing your job." With the EPA downplaying any toxic effects, she is getting little sympathy from agencies and insurance companies.
In EPA Ombudsman Robert Martin's Earth Day resignation letter, he accused EPA Administrator Whitman of withholding data about the toxic air at the World Trade Center for personal gain. He discovered that Whitman is married to a man who served for years as an officer of Citigroup and who now manages about $800 million of the firm's investments.
Martin said he later discovered that Citigroup owns Traveler's Insurance, the insurance company of many buildings in World Trade Center area. He feels that because Whitman issued a statement assuring people that everything was fine, Traveler's saved a lot of money by not having to pay claims.
These accusations are now being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.
While studies and investigations continue, people suffer from an environmental catastrophe. I challenge a group of attorneys to come forward, find the rescue and cleanup workers who have been poisoned by working at the World Trade Center site, and force the government to accept responsibility for their health care.
We will never end terrorism in the world if we can't eradicate injustice and greed from our own government agencies, political leaders, and industries.
(MSNBC)
Related deals from MSN Shopping- Kenmore Deluxe Water Purifier …Sears.com
NEW YORK, Jan. 4 — Four Port Authority police officers working at ground zero have been reassigned after tests showed elevated levels of mercury in their blood, officials said Friday. The news comes just weeks after reports that as many as 500 firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center site have taken leave for respiratory problems — ailments could force many of them into retirement.
ALL FOUR POLICE workers were in good health and had no symptoms of mercury poisoning, said Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman Allen Morrison. High levels of mercury can damage the brain, kidneys and lungs.
The source of the mercury was not known. Mercury enters the environment naturally and through industrial pollution.
“We can’t be certain whether working at ground zero caused the elevation in those four cases, but we didn’t want to take a chance,” Morrison said.
An increased level of heavy metals, including mercury, was also found in preliminary tests done at a building across from the World Trade Center site where the Legal Aid Society was housed before the Sept. 11 attack, spokeswoman Pat Bath said. More tests are being done.
Environmental Protection Agency regional spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow said any elevated levels of mercury in the blood of workers at ground zero should be taken seriously, and she urged work crews to continue wearing respirators.
But so far, she said, there is no definitive evidence the mercury came from ground zero.
AIR, WATER TESTS NEGATIVE
Early air and water samples taken at the site failed to turn up any detectable levels of mercury, and officials were unable to find any large source of mercury in or around the twin towers, she said.
“So the critical question,” Bellow said, “is what would the source be?”
Morrison said the Port Authority began testing ground zero workers in November because of the possibility of toxins at the site. Out of 58 tests conducted, 49 results came back and four were elevated, Morrison said.
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Two of the four officers had mercury levels of 14 micrograms per liter, one had 18 and another 24, Morrison said.
Scientists agree that when absorbed in high enough doses, mercury, in all its chemical forms, can damage the brain, nervous system, kidneys and other organs, especially in infants and children. But they differ on not only how much mercury must be absorbed to cause adverse health effects.
Health officials told the Port Authority that an acceptable mercury level is 0 to 13 micrograms per liter of blood.
FIREMEN PLAGUED BY LUNG WOES
The city’s fire department, already concerned about a high rate of lung ailments among firemen, said it’s going to conduct its own mercury tests.
Many of the workers who participated in rescue and recovery efforts are easily winded, suffer from a chronic cough, or have symptoms of asthma, according to Thomas Manley, sergeant-at-arms for the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
Some have predicted that workers at ground zero might face lung, as well as other health, problems.
New York Department of Health’s Sandra Mullin said workers who dug in around the fires in the charred carcass of the World Trade Center could have been placing themselves at risk. “It’s quite possible that workers could come down with coughing fits and longer term problems if they don’t follow the proper precautions.”
And proper equipment often wasn’t available or used. Tom Barnett, a Manhattan police officer and a trustee of the city’s Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, told MSNBC.com’s Your Environment column in September that many police, fire and other rescue workers went unprotected in the first few days after the catastrophe.
Barnett, who was on the scene of the wreckage in the beginning, expressed fears then that many could develop illnesses as a result.
“There were too many to count down there,” said Barnett, who added, “No one was sick in the beginning of the Gulf War, but as time went on they developed illnesses. I can only imagine that the same thing could happen here.”
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Cockroaches - A disaster that was waiting to happen to you
The history of the cockroach is one of nature's greatest success stories.
Cockroaches are among the oldest living things on the planet - literally older than the hills. Over 300 million years ago the Appalachian Mountains and the Alps were rising - and cockroaches were there. Eons later, the futile method of control practiced throughout human history had its start when they got underfoot of the dinosaurs.
Cockroaches are remarkable survivors. They can go weeks without food or water. And they have adapted to conditions in nearly every corner of the globe. However, of the nearly 4000 species, only five are major indoor pests in the United States: the American cockroach, the Oriental, the brown-banded, the smokey brown, and most widespread of all, the German cockroach.
These five, however, do enough damage to rank cockroaches with termites as the most destructive indoor pests in the country. But unlike termites, which consume and destroy, cockroaches contaminate and infect. Cockroaches transmit at least 13 human diseases, usually by contaminating food through simple body contact or through their saliva or excrement. Their calling cards include common food poisoning as well as typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, allergies and leprosy.
However, they can also exact a toll in economic losses and mental distress. In restaurants, a cockroach on the floor sends diners out the door. In offices, cockroaches have been known to enter and short-circuit computers and other sensitive electronic equipment. And their mere presence is a major embarrassment in any home.
Whitmire Micro-Gen Introductory Corporate Pest Control
The Quarterly
Industry Trends
In the May issue of PCT Magazine, there was an article by Stoy Hedges that proclaimed ants the number one pest PCOs have to deal with on a year round basis. Where have all the cockroaches and fleas gone? This is an important question for Whitmire Micro-Gen as we make decisions on where to focus our Research & Development efforts to make sure we continue to provide the industry with the right products, treatment protocols and training programs when you need them.
In an attempt to quantify some of these trends we are seeing in the industry, I reviewed some independent research conducted with homeowners over the last ten years where respondents were asked what insects were present inside and outside their homes. On a national basis, ants have been consistently the number one pest. Starting with 1988 and using ant incidence as the base, we can see some pretty dramatic changes.
Indoors, cockroach and flea problems, as reported by homeowners, have dropped dramatically to less than half the magnitude of ants. Note the big drop from 1997 to 1998. It appears that the new technologies for controlling cockroaches and fleas introduced over the past few years have been successful in reducing these problems for the homeowner.
For outdoor problems, there is less data available and the trends are less clear. However, ants are far and away the number one problem with other insect problems declining in relation to ants over the last year.
Will these trends continue? Whitmire Micro-Gen believes that ant problems will continue to grow and that we will need to continue to develop new and innovative solutions (like AdvanceTM Carpenter Ant Bait) to control the various ant species that are causing problems for pest control companies across the nation.
We also believe that the battle against the cockroach is not over. As pointed out by Stoy Hedges in the PCT article, cockroaches are still the major pest in commercial settings. With their ability to develop resistance, we believe it is important that we continue to provide a variety of treatment products and techniques to ensure on-going success. With fleas, we have seen some regional breakouts that would indicate that the decline here may have bottomed out and we expect to see some small increases in incidence over the next few years.
| INDOORS | ||||
| 1988 | 1992 | 1997 | 1998 | |
| Ants | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Cockroaches | 80% | 55% | 52% | 41% |
| Fleas | 45% | 42% | 41% | 31% |
| OUTDOORS | ||||
| 1992 | 1997 | 1998 | ||
| Ants | 100% | 100% | 100% | |
| Fire Ants | NA | 47% | 38% | |
| Cockroaches | 27% | 33% | 26% | |
| Fleas | 39% | 38% | 31% | |
| Wasps & Hornets | 82% | 100% | 97% | |
Tiny Game Hunting:Cockroaches
EXCERPT:Dusts Boric acid is the one anti-insect substance that poisons but does not repel roaches, and they haven't developed resistance to it after decades of use. It is much more effective and less expensive than synthetic pesticides, and it will not harm people or pets unless they eat it.
Boric acid was commonly used as an eyewash and antiseptic, and you can still find the powder in drugstores. But better formulations of boric acid are now available, ones that have been electrically charged to keep it from caking. Others have been colored or bitterly flavored to keep kids from eating it.
You can get cockroaches to ingest boric acid by using it in a bait, or you can simply get them to walk through it by dusting it around their habitat with a bulb duster or a narrow-tipped bottle. It has to be dusted extremely finely over the areas where roaches may pass, not dumped in lumps, which they will simply walk around. Having walked through it, roaches will then ingest it while cleaning their feet, because they are constantly and fastidiously grooming themselves.
After using sticky traps to figure out where roaches are living, blow boric acid into cracks and crevices, between walls and under sinks, and along baseboards. Puff it around under refrigerators and stoves and other appliances. You can even add it (or Borax) to water and mop the floor and wipe down walls and counters with it.
You can also treat for roaches by dusting with diatomaceous earth or a silica gel. These dusts scratch the protective waxy outer layer of the cockroach, leading to desiccation and death. Like boric acid, they are applied in such a way that the insect ends up walking through them. Goggles and a mask should be used with all dusts, even though they are nontoxic in the usual sense. This is one treatment that, if undisturbed, does not have to be reapplied.
(NYT JANUARY 13, 2000)
NEW YORK -- As sympathetic victims, common urban pigeons -- even those murdered by the elusive poison-wielding serial killer who has been stalking them in Manhattan for the past two years -- are a tough sell.
Mark MacDonald, a detective for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who has become the guardian angel of all living local pigeons and an avenging angel for the deceased, accepts that the 8 million or so pigeons that use New York as their personal coop-and-poop receptacle will never be mistaken for man's best friend.
The ancient Egyptians and Romans found pigeons most useful when cooked; Venice recently dealt with its pigeon overpopulation problem by gassing 20,000 birds. In New York, exterminators can use avitrol, a legal poison, to eliminate nuisance birds who befoul the terraces, windows and canopies of the city's luxury abodes. MacDonald bemoans but accepts that, too.
"For every 50 pigeons killed today, there's 50 more born tomorrow," he says. But propagation isn't the point. What MacDonald doesn't accept is mean-spirited murder, especially murder with a domino effect that has also killed hawks, peregrines, sparrows, bluejays and a pair of Central Park mallards: "This Mr. Evil is never going to make pigeons an endangered species," asserts the gray-muzzled MacDonald, who slicks his hair back Eddie Munster-style and whose investigative mode is equal parts DeNiro, Columbo and Dumbo (he says it helps to play dumb when you're about to confiscate an illegal or battered pet or to collar the ringleaders and patrons at pit-bull and cock fights).
Against the pigeon killer, though, MacDonald is trying to play it smart. He has to: "He's going to make my life miserable until he makes a mistake and we catch him, and God forbid the poison does trickle down to a child or a domestic pet before we get him."
With or without public sympathy, but with the support of "National Geographic Explorer," which ran a special about his efforts last Sunday on CNBC (it will be rebroadcast on Saturday), MacDonald is staying his course. There's a killer on the loose, and he intends to find him, cuff him and charge him with animal cruelty, now a felony that commands a four-year jail term and $2,500 fine.
It's an unsolved metropolitan mystery where the trail has turned cold after more than a thousand deaths. The detective has nightmares about the elusive bird-hater who continues to toss an illegal and terribly toxic poison, carbofuran, into city streets and parks where pigeons congregate. Accustomed to achieving closure in his cases, MacDonald has become obsessed by his inability to do so with this one, now in its third year.
"It's one of the very few cases in my career where I've done what I swore I wouldn't do: Take the case home with me," he says while rough-housing with Richie, a canine resident awaiting adoption at the ASPCA's East 92nd Street headquarters. "When I get into the car, when I get home, when I'm with my kids, it's there. I may be out on the lake fishing," says the detective, who practices the catch-and-release method, "but my brain is back on Fifth Avenue, trying to figure out if there's some little detail I missed."
From the start, the case of the pigeon perp was assigned to MacDonald, an investigator for Humane Law Enforcement, a pistol-wielding 13-person team that each year handles 4,500 complaints and makes 200 arrests.
MacDonald, a 27-year veteran of the ASPCA, where he started out cleaning kennels at 18 (and met his wife, who worked there 14 years), has a generous respect for all animals. Who else would feel comfortable sharing office space with an impressively fanged quartet of tarantulas (the biggest one is named Conan), a pair of hissing cockroaches (one of his three children christened them Jack and Jill), and a nasty-looking electric eel (call it Anonymous) that packs an 1,100-volt charge. His Eeepy Creepy Day, which stars confiscated animals, is always a big hit when he performs a show-and-tell at city schools.
He landed in the hospital with dog bites twice in the pre-1995 era when his squad, not the Center for Animal Control, was responsible for rounding up strays, but MacDonald didn't hold it against the biters. The Rottweiler who mauled his ribs was defending his home, a junked car; the German shepherd who sank his teeth through MacDonald's right hand was protecting a female. The day he removed a pet bobcat from a Queens apartment, he "felt like a heel. They were taking wonderful care of it."
But it was MacDonald's fondness for pigeons, a relatively rare trait in humans, that made him such a natural to pursue the case when birds began convulsing, and dying, in droves two summers ago on the Upper East Side. Aha! MacDonald's father once raised racing pigeons, Canadian High Fliers and tiplets, back when he and his five siblings were growing up in a Norwalk, Conn., household/menagerie that also contained dogs, cats, canaries, fish and a monkey named Pete.
He developed an appreciation for the birds, even the nonpedigreed city pigeons. When MacDonald was 12, his father, an engineer with Armstrong Rubber, was transferred and the family moved to a tenement in Flatbush, Brooklyn. And that meant no more rooftop coop.
"Losing those pigeons kind of broke my father's heart," he says.
Like father, like son.
(WASHTIMES-notes from the pentagon)
The Tu-95 Bear H bombers were part of a group of four bombers that deployed recently to the military air base near Anadyr, a port in the northern Far East of Russia. The bombers can carry up to 16 Kh-55 strategic cruise missiles, which are equipped with 200-kiloton nuclear warheads.
The bombers flew north along the coast of Alaska. The Air Force scrambled two F-15 jet fighters to intercept the propeller-driven bombers. The F-15s shadowed the bombers for a short distance and then broke off.
It was the first time since September 11 that the Russian military made a run at U.S. air defenses. Russian military forces in the Far East were involved in strategic nuclear forces exercises when the terrorist attacks occurred. They halted the maneuvers, which U.S. military intelligence expected would have included air defense probes like the one that occurred recently.
The Russian bomber probe took place as U.S. and Russian officials in Moscow failed to reach the terms of a new accord on strategic arms reduction. It also took place amid recent criticism by officials in Moscow of U.S. intelligence-sharing on terrorism.
Viktor Komogorov, deputy director of Russia's Federal Security Service, formerly the domestic branch of the Soviet KGB, said Russia provided the CIA with 100 reports in February but received only 50 from the agency, the Interfax news agency reported. He criticized the CIA report as "bare facts" and said Russia's reports included terrorist plans and intentions. "This is not the kind of cooperation in resisting international terrorism that we had counted on," he said, noting that Russian requests for more U.S. intelligence were denied.
(ABCNEWS-Nightline)
April 21 — The worst anti-Semitism is obvious — Jewish cemeteries defaced, synagogues torched, Jewish schoolchildren stoned. But what about protests against Israel, which appear on the rise in the United States and Europe?
"The slander of anti-Semitism is something that no critic of Israel has really been spared," said Christopher Hitchens, a Washington-based British writer known for his support of the Palestinian cause.
"I know of many honest people who really doubt the wisdom of Israel's attempt to hold on to Arab territory, and who simply feel that the raising of their voice on it would be more trouble than its worth because of an allegation that, as I say, no serious person can bear to be accused of," he added.
Israel Not Immune to Criticism
If you ask them the question directly, Jewish rights activists say critics of Israel might not have to fear charges of anti-Semitism as much as they think.
"Israel is not immune from being criticized," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which keeps on eye out for anti-Semitism. "Israel is a sovereign nation. It can make mistakes. And people can criticize it with impunity."
But the record has shown that the criticism cannot be made with impunity. In attempting to objectively report the story of the unrest in the Middle East, news organizations receive criticism from supporters of both sides.
"Your anti-Semitic approach to Israel is the reason I stopped watching your show," one viewer wrote in a typical e-mail to ABCNEWS' Nightline.
The Los Angeles Times was boycotted for a day by several hundred readers that organized a protest over what they perceived as the paper's anti-Israel bias.
Foxman understands why many Jews are sensitive.
"The gas chambers and crematory in Auschwitz did not begin with bricks, they began with words," Foxman said, referring to the origins of the Holocaust in Europe.
"Anti-Semitism is probably the oldest group pressure there is in history," said Elie Wiesel, a human rights activist and Holocaust survivor. "It survived fascism, it survived Nazism, it survived communism, but it's still here."
Intent Can Be Key
For those seen to be critical of Israel, the intent of the criticism can be the key, Foxman said.
"I usually ask someone … `You set a standard. OK. Have you set that standard of moral behavior, or whatever behavior, to any other place in the world?'" Foxman said. "[If not], I come to the conclusion that's an anti-Semite. He's not just criticizing Israel. He wants the Jewish state not to exist."
"One can be critical of Israel's policies and not be an anti-Semite," Wiesel said. "It is possible. But there are people who have always been against Israel. Then, I think I'm entitled to have some doubts. But, again, I do not believe that automatically, a person who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite."
So where is the line? What about people who call Israel's West Bank settlements colonialist? Is that word out of bounds?
"It's not out of bounds," Foxman said. "It's a loaded word."
And what if someone calls Ariel Sharon a murderer?
"I can deal with that," Foxman said. "Two countries at war. You don't like one country that's at war. OK, he's a murderer."
But it's the next step, Foxman says, that crosses the line.
"If he says 'Sharon is Hitler or Nazi,' that's anti-Semitism," Foxman said. "Either he doesn't know what the Holocaust was all about, or he knows, but he doesn't care. That's anti-Semitism."
"It's an obscene analogy," Hitchens agreed. "I know it's intended to wound and intended to insult."
But, he added, so is the comparison of Yasser Arafat to Adolf Hitler, a comparison that Arafat's critics often make.
"It would be a good thing if the Israelis and their spokesmen stopped comparing penniless, hopeless refugees to members of the SS," Hitchens said. "I think, really, it should be agreed on all sides. I think this will be something which would clear the air for everybody and allow the argument to be conducted much more sanely. Nobody should mention the Nazi comparison in discussing a decent settlement between Israelis and Palestinians."
Critics ‘Must Disprove … Anti-Semitism’
Hitchens holds the view that the Jewish state, which celebrated its 54th birthday last week, is not something the Jewish people need. That's a view that many Jews would call anti-Semitic, even though Hitchens is the son of a Jewish mother and is married to a Jewish woman.
"It's been the experience of a lot of people like myself, who sympathize with the Palestinian cause, that they often feel they have to almost disprove the allegation of anti-Semitism before the argument can begin or before they can be allowed to participate in it," Hitchens said.
Hitchens said speaking out against Israel can be more dangerous in the United States, where support is high for Israel, than in Europe, where the Palestinian cause has more popular support.
"Here's an example of where one has to choose one's words with extreme care," Hitchens said. "No intelligent person living in Washington would disagree with the following statement: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is perhaps the most powerful lobby in the city. Maybe the National Rifle Association is stronger. Probably not. That's an objective fact. Everyone knows it's true."
Hitchens chose his words carefully because talk of a Jewish lobby can be another one of those dangerous topics. It's dangerous for Jews because it feeds the imaginations of real anti-Semites who believe in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. It's dangerous for those who would discuss Jewish political influence, because they risk the charge of anti-Semitism.
‘We Forget So Fast’
Criticism can be especially sensitive to Jewish activists at this time, when they perceive anti-Semitism on the rise.
"The state of Israel, Zionism, was meant to be a cure of anti-Semitism," Wiesel said. "However, it's not that simple, because I think the real reason is that we left the memories of the Holocaust. The first years, or even the first decades, following that tragedy — which was the greatest tragedy, to me, in our history — people were embarrassed by anti-Semitism. It wasn't nice. It wasn't decent to be openly anti-Semitic. You hardly could hear anyone say that he hates Jews.
"Because we forget so fast, … people now say it openly," Wiesel added. "I get many hate letters. You can imagine, because I'm outspoken. I do have certain positions. In the beginning, they were all anonymous. Now they are signed. People don't hesitate to sign their names, their address, and say, `We hate you, and this is why we hate you.' That is, I think, the real reason why today anti-Semitism is on the rise. It's not because of Israel."
by Ted Rall
Fri Apr 26
NEW YORK-First, let's get this straight: no nation enjoys a "right to exist." Countries are created by people killing other people who used to live in a place; countries continue to exist as long as their citizens are willing to kill other people to keep them the hell out. Thus, the U.S. exists.
And so does Israel.
Arab countries' newfound willingness to acknowledge the fact of Israel's existence in exchange for steps towards a Palestinian state is nice but ultimately inconsequential. Israel is, period. Who cares whether or not it has the right to exist? Rand McNally doesn't determine nationhood. Force does.
As long as the United States continues to pour in $3 billion a year in aid-more than the total for all other nations combined-Israel will continue to thrive. (By comparison, war-torn Afghanistan (news - web sites) is only slated to get $300 million next year.) As for the willingness to kill other guys to keep them out...well, that's the trouble.
Right-wing extremist Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) has unleashed a horrific onslaught upon Gaza and the West Bank that has left all but the most hardened pro-Israel hawks disgusted. An April 17th Pew Research Center poll shows public support for Israel down to 42 percent in the wake of Sharon's latest incursion.
Sharon's shock troops are using the same tactics-reprisal assassinations, torture, demolitions and mass arrests-that most Israelis' parents and grandparents witnessed as victims of the Third Reich. And we're subsidizing it all.
Strategy and Geopolitics
"Israel, like any country in the world, has the right to defend itself against the cruel terror perpetrated against it from centers of terror located only several kilometers from its population centers," Sharon said April 7th. But with five Palestinians dying for every murdered Israeli, the self-defense argument is falling on increasingly deaf American ears. It's not working, either-the more Sharon retaliates, the more dead Israelis he has to retaliate for.
Sharon's excessive use of force is causing an increasing number of Americans to wonder whether it's time to cut off aid and let both sides slog it out.
It is hard to tell, from a realpolitik standpoint, why we spend so much money on such a sandy waste. "Israel...is a good friend of the United States-one of the best friends we will ever have," House majority leader Dick Armey reiterated April 15th. Yet Israel neither possesses natural resources nor geographically separates us from those of another country. Because of its status as a Jewish state, it almost never contributes troops to American-led military operations, many of which take place in Muslim nations these days. Love it or hate it, U.S. support for Israel is pretty much a one-way deal.
Israel's 5.7 million people live on a plot of sun-bleached rocks the size of New Jersey. Our unconditional support for this tiny country offends hundreds of millions of Muslims spanning the globe from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines, whose countries possess the vast majority of the globe's energy resources. The U.S.-Israeli alliance also provides endless fodder to radical Islamists currently planning the next 9-11. In short, Israel is arguably the greatest single geopolitical liability to the security and economy of the United States.
Our Moral Obligation
Doing good, however, doesn't always mean doing well. The Truman Administration was primarily responsible for the 1948 U.N. mandate that created a fledgling Israel surrounded by hostile enemies. Both the legacy of the Holocaust and the continuing poison of anti-Semitism requires a state where the world's Jews can go to feel safe. To hell with all that Arab oil-don't we have a moral obligation to support the only working democracy in the Middle East in the face of incessant terrorist attacks?
We do owe Israel our support, but not $3 billion a year. U.S. backing began with Israel's creation, lasted through several wars and continued through more than a half-century of generous gifts of cash and state-of-the-art military hardware. As a result, Israel is-unlike its neighbors-a modern, technologically-advanced First World country with European-class infrastructure. If U.S. financial assistance were to end the second you read this, the Israeli army and air force would nevertheless remain the region's best-armed and best-trained for many years to come.
Let the Bird Leave the Nest
That outsized military and economic advantage ensures that the current war-that-won't-speak-its-name between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) would continue for the foreseeable future. American-made fighter jets and helicopter gunships would continue to rain death on the West Bank; born-to-lose Arab teens would still blow themselves up in Israeli markets. Nothing much would change, but at least the U.S. would no longer be intimately implicated in the carnage-and we'd save a huge amount of money in the bargain.
Anyone who has visited the Middle East can't help but be impressed by the energy, intelligence and resolve of the Israeli people. An end to American subsidies would force them to deal with such long-standing structural problems as high unemployment, systemic constitutional tensions and demographic trends that threaten to turn their country into a Jewish state with a Jewish minority.
Independence from Washington doesn't have to lead to Arafat's fantasy of pushing Israel into the sea. A cut in U.S. subsidies could be phased out gradually, perhaps over the next ten years. More importantly, the U.S. should sign a mutual defense treaty committing to come to Israel's aid in the event of an invasion. Independence shouldn't equal abandonment, and support shouldn't equal international welfare.
(Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent coverage of the Afghan war titled "To Afghanistan and Back," hits stores this week. Ordering and review-copy information are available at nbmpub.com.)
U.S. Blueprint to Topple Hussein Envisions Big Invasion Next Year- (NYT)
Sun Apr 28 2002
WASHINGTON, April 27 — The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.
But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions. These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock, and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Until recently, the administration had contemplated a possible confrontation with Mr. Hussein this fall, after building a case at the United Nations that the Iraqi leader is unwilling to allow the kind of highly intrusive inspections needed to prove that he has no weapons of mass destruction.
Now that schedule seems less realistic. Conflict in the Middle East has widened a rift within the administration over whether military action can be undertaken without inflaming Arab states and prompting anti-American violence throughout the region.
In his public speeches, President Bush still sounds as intent as ever about ousting Mr. Hussein, making it clear that he will not let the Middle East crisis obscure his goal. But he has not issued any order for the Pentagon to mobilize its forces, and today there is no official "war plan."
Instead, policy makers and operational commanders are trying to sketch out the broad outlines of the confrontation they expect.
Among the many questions they must address is where to base air and ground forces in the region.
Even before Mr. Bush's tense meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Thursday, the Pentagon was working on the assumption that it might have to carry out any military action without the use of bases in the kingdom.
The planning now anticipates the possible extensive use of bases for American forces in Turkey and Kuwait, with Qatar as the replacement for the sophisticated air operations center in Saudi Arabia, and with Oman and Bahrain playing important roles.
As to any war plan itself, the military expects to be asked for a more traditional approach than the unconventional campaign in Afghanistan . Such an approach would resemble the Persian Gulf war in style if not in size and would be fought with even more modern weapons and more dynamic tactics.
"The president has not made any decisions," a senior Defense Department official said. "But any efforts against Iraq will not look like what we did in Afghanistan."
Vice President Dick Cheney , Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and their senior aides contend that Arab leaders would publicly protest but secretly celebrate Mr. Hussein's downfall — as long as the operation were decisive — and that ousting him would actually ease the job of calming violence between Israel and the Palestinians. They believe that warnings of uprisings among Arab populations are overblown and compare them to similar warnings before the gulf war, which proved unfounded.
"It has been the consistent drumbeat from our friends in the region that if we are serious, they will be with us," said an administration official in this camp.
But others at the State Department and the White House argue that efforts to topple Mr. Hussein would be viewed by Arabs as a confrontation with Islam, destabilizing the region and complicating the broader campaign against Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda.
The reaction in Saudi Arabia is already critical. The United States would need permission to use Saudi airspace adjacent to Iraq, if not Saudi air bases, officials said, but it is unclear whether Mr. Bush took up that subject with Crown Prince Abdullah when the topic of Iraq came up. Mr. Rumsfeld, who met with the Saudi leader a day ahead of Mr. Bush, said access to bases "was not a topic at all" of his discussions.
Turkish officials, for their part, said that no negotiations on basing American troops for a new campaign against Iraq had yet taken place; American officials confirmed that, calling such talks premature.
Kuwait's position, too, is uncertain. At an Arab League summit meeting in March, Iraq agreed to recognize Kuwait and pledged not to invade again in exchange for a declaration that an attack on Iraq would be considered an attack against all Arab states. But American officials said they could rely on Kuwait, whose very survival is owed to American military power after Iraq invaded the country in 1990.
Senior administration, Pentagon and military officials say that consensus has emerged that there is little chance for a military coup to unseat Mr. Hussein from within, even with the United States exerting economic and military pressure and providing covert assistance.
"There have been at least six coup attempts in the 1990's, and they consistently fail," an administration official said. In each instance, this official said, dissident Iraqi military officers "sent signals to us, `We're ready for a coup,' and the next thing you know these guys are murdered or it fails or people have cold feet at the end and leave the country."
"It's a horrific police state," the official said. "Nobody trusts anyone, so how can you pull off a coup?"
Similarly, officials say they do not believe that even an expanded version of the strategy used to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan would work. In that model, precision airstrikes combined with indigenous armed opposition under the leadership of American Special Operations forces and C.I.A. officers did the job.
The parallel strategy in Iraq would involve the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south. But Mr. Hussein's military, while only one-third its strength from before the gulf war, is strong enough to defeat any confrontation by proxy, officials said.
Officials said the nascent plans for a heavy air campaign and land assault already included rough numbers of troops, ranging from a minimum of about 70,000 to 100,000 — one Army corps or a reinforced corps — to a top of 250,000 troops, which still would be only half the number used in the gulf war. Other than troops from Britain, no significant contribution of allied forces is anticipated.
The military requirements for changing the government in Baghdad would be vastly different than the gulf war mission, which was to drive an entrenched enemy from a large occupied area, senior military officers said.
"We would not need to hold territory and protect our flanks to the same extent," one officer said. "You would see a higher level of maneuver and airborne assault, dropping in vertically and enveloping targets — less slogging mile by mile through the desert."
Even so, officers said, moving tens of thousands of troops to a region with access more limited than in the gulf war could be a logistical challenge. The modern American military has never fought the kind of dangerous and complicated urban battles that might be needed to oust the Hussein government.
Dealing with Mr. Hussein's suspected chemical and biological weapons would require pre-emptive strikes by precision weapons, as well as an element of heavy deterrence.
"One of the things we would want to do is say that any Iraqi officer or soldier who throws chemical or biological weapons at us will be held personally responsible," said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who directed the Air Force's definitive study of the Persian Gulf war. "You say, `You guys operating the missile batteries: we will find you, and you will pay.' Saddam's people have no desire to go down in a blaze of glory with him."
While the Pentagon has focused on how to remove Mr. Hussein, the White House is also mindful of the effects of a war on oil supplies — either because the fighting itself would disrupt the flow of oil, or because Saudi Arabia and other Arab producers would feel obliged because of political pressure at home to cut exports to the United States.
R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, said the administration had examined the possible effects of a spike in oil prices caused by spreading unrest in the Middle East or an invasion of Iraq.
He said a surge in oil prices would probably not by itself have a large effect on the American economy. But he said it was more difficult to assess the possible effects on consumer and business confidence. One of the lessons of the gulf war, he said, was that consumer confidence recovered once the United States made clear that it intended to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait and guarantee the security of the Saudi oilfields.
In November, Mr. Bush ordered that the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve be filled to capacity. A review of the reserve's delivery schedule shows that many of the largest monthly deliveries are between September and January, another reason to put off any offensive against Iraq to early next year.
"We want to be in a position to go into the markets if speculators begin bidding up the price of oil, and settle them down fast," one official said.
Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
April 26, 2002
Bullying people from your town to China
Corporations rule. No other institution comes close to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us. The clout of all 535 members of Congress is nothing compared to the individual and collective power of these predatory behemoths that now roam the globe, working their will over all competing interests.
The aloof and pampered executives who run today’s autocratic and secretive corporate states have effectively become our sovereigns. From who gets health care to who pays taxes, from what’s on the news to what’s in our food, they have usurped the people’s democratic authority and now make these broad social decisions in private, based solely on the interests of their corporations. Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the villainous old robber baron William Henry Vanderbilt spat out: "The public be damned! I’m working for my stockholders."
The media and politicians won’t discuss this, for obvious reasons, but we must if we’re actually to be a self-governing people. That’s why the Lowdown is launching this occasional series of corporate profiles. And why not start with the biggest and one of the worst actors?
The beast from Bentonville
Wal-Mart is now the world’s biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and Ireland combined).
Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks, we’re-just-folks-from-Arkansas image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying to sell stuff cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however, is what one union leader calls "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers.
Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the bone in order to deliver "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet.
Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons—the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked by London’s "Rich List 2001" as the wealthiest human on the planet, having sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping Bill Gates as No. 1.
Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way—by roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier.
With more than one million employees (three times more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country’s largest private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace in its image—which is not pretty.
Yes, there is the happy-faced "greeter" who welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or "associates," as the company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: "Gimme a ‘W!’" shouts the cheerleader; "W!" the dutiful employees respond. "Gimme an A!’" And so on.
Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.
Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it—only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered.
Thinking union? Get outta here! "Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization," reads a company guidebook for supervisors. "You, as a manager, are expected to support the company’s position. . . . This may mean walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct."
Wal-Mart is in fact rabidly anti-union, deploying teams of union-busters from Bentonville to any spot where there’s a whisper of organizing activity. "While unions might be appropriate for other companies, they have no place at Wal-Mart," a spokeswoman told a Texas Observer reporter who was covering an NLRB hearing on the company’s manhandling of 11 meat-cutters who worked at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas.
These derring-do employees were sick of working harder and longer for the same low pay. "We signed [union] cards, and all hell broke loose," says Sidney Smith, one of the Jacksonville meat-cutters who established the first-ever Wal-Mart union in the U.S., voting in February 2000 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Eleven days later, Wal-Mart announced that it was closing the meat-cutting departments in all of its stores and would henceforth buy prepackaged meat elsewhere.
But the repressive company didn’t stop there. As the Observer reports: "Smith was fired for theft—after a manger agreed to let him buy a box of overripe bananas for 50 cents, Smith ate one banana before paying for the box, and was judged to have stolen that banana."
Wal-Mart is an unrepentant and recidivist violator of employee rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges from coast to coast. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had to file more suits against the Bentonville billionaires club for cases of disability discrimination than any other corporation. A top EEOC lawyer told Business Week, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law."
Likewise, a national class-action suit reveals an astonishing pattern of sexual discrimination at Wal-Mart (where 72% of the salespeople are women), charging that there is "a harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation."
Workers’ compensation laws, child-labor laws (1,400 violations in Maine alone), surveillance of employees—you name it, this corporation is a repeat offender. No wonder, then, that turnover in the stores is above 50% a year, with many stores having to replace 100% of their employees each year, and some reaching as high as a 300% turnover!
Worldwide wage-depressor
Then there’s China. For years, Wal-Mart saturated the airwaves with a "We Buy American" advertising campaign, but it was nothing more than a red-white-and-blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the products it sold were from cheap-labor hell-holes, especially China. In 1998, after several exposes of this sham, the company finally dropped its "patriotism" posture and by 2001 had even moved its worldwide purchasing headquarters to China. Today, it is the largest importer of Chinese-made products in the world, buying $10 billion worth of merchandise from several thousand Chinese factories.
As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst," adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation "is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions."
Wal-Mart does not want the U.S. buying public to know that its famous low prices are the product of human misery, so while it loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a corporate "code of conduct" to treat workers decently, it strictly prohibits the disclosure of any factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing the "code" in operation.
Kernaghan’s NLC, acclaimed for its fact-packed reports on global working conditions, found several Chinese factories that make the toys Americans buy for their children at Wal-Mart. Seventy-one percent of the toys sold in the U.S. come from China, and Wal-Mart now sells one out of five of the toys we buy.
NLC interviewed workers in China’s Guangdong Province who toil in factories making popular action figures, dolls, and other toys sold at Wal-Mart. In "Toys of Misery," a shocking 58-page report that the establishment media ignored, NLC describes:
13- to 16-hour days molding, assembling, and spray-painting toys—8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or even midnight, seven days a week, with 20-hour shifts in peak season.
Even though China’s minimum wage is 31 cents an hour—which doesn’t begin to cover a person’s basic subsistence-level needs—these production workers are paid 13 cents an hour.
Workers typically live in squatter shacks, seven feet by seven feet, or jammed in company dorms, with more than a dozen sharing a cubicle costing $1.95 a week for rent. They pay about $5.50 a week for lousy food. They also must pay for their own medical treatment and are fired if they are too ill to work.
The work is literally sickening, since there’s no health and safety enforcement. Workers have constant headaches and nausea from paint-dust hanging in the air; the indoor temperature tops 100 degrees; protective clothing is a joke; repetitive stress disorders are rampant; and there’s no training on the health hazards of handling the plastics, glue, paint thinners, and other solvents in which these workers are immersed every day.
As for Wal-Mart’s highly vaunted "code of conduct," NLC could not find a single worker who had ever seen or heard of it.
These factories employ mostly young women and teenage girls. Wal-Mart, renowned for knowing every detail of its global business operations and for calculating every penny of a product’s cost, knows what goes on inside these places. Yet, when confronted with these facts, corporate honchos claim ignorance and wash their hands of the exploitation: "There will always be people who break the law," says CEO Lee Scott. "It is an issue of human greed among a few people."
Those "few people" include him, other top managers, and the Walton billionaires. Each of them not only knows about their company’s exploitation, but willingly prospers from a corporate culture that demands it. "Get costs down" is Wal-Mart’s mantra and modus operandi, and that translates into a crusade to stamp down the folks who produce its goods and services, shamelessly building its low-price strategy and profits on their backs.
The Wal-Mart gospel
Worse, Wal-Mart is on a messianic mission to extend its exploitative ethos to the entire business world. More than 65,000 companies supply the retailer with the stuff on its shelves, and it constantly hammers each supplier about cutting their production costs deeper and deeper in order to get cheaper wholesale prices. Some companies have to open their books so Bentonville executives can red-pencil what CEO Scott terms "unnecessary costs."
Of course, among the unnecessaries to him are the use of union labor and producing goods in America, and Scott is unabashed about pointing in the direction of China or other places for abysmally low production costs. He doesn’t even have to say "Move to China"—his purchasing executives demand such an impossible lowball price from suppliers that they can only meet it if they follow Wal-Mart’s labor example. With its dominance over its own 1.2 million workers and 65,000 suppliers, plus its alliances with ruthless labor abusers abroad, this one company is the world’s most powerful private force for lowering labor standards and stifling the middle-class aspirations of workers everywhere.
Using its sheer size, market clout, access to capital, and massive advertising budget, the company also is squeezing out competitors and forcing its remaining rivals to adopt its price-is-everything approach.
Even the big boys like Toys R Us and Kroger are daunted by the company’s brutish power, saying they’re compelled to slash wages and search the globe for sweatshop suppliers in order to compete in the downward race to match Wal-Mart’s prices.
How high of a price are we willing to pay for Wal-Mart’s "low-price" model? This outfit operates with an avarice, arrogance, and ambition that would make Enron blush. It hits a town or city neighborhood like a retailing neutron bomb, sucking out the economic vitality and all of the local character. And Wal-Mart’s stores now have more kill-power than ever, with its Supercenters averaging 200,000 square feet—the size of more than four football fields under one roof! These things land splat on top of any community’s sense of itself and devour local business.
By slashing its retail prices way below cost when it enters a community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has mono-poly control over the market.
But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores, at least they’re creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it creates—and a store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain a community’s middle-class living standard.
Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas).
It’s our world
Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies—or theirs? Wal-Mart’s radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof—there goes another local business. Poof—there goes our middle-class wages. Poof—there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it’s an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public’s "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart’s "cheap" goods—and if we actually had a chance to vote.
Much to the corporation’s consternation, more and more communities are learning about this voracious powerhouse, and there’s a rising civic rebellion against it. Tremendous victories have already been won as citizens from Maine to Arizona, from the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, have organized locally and even statewide to thwart the expansionist march of the Wal-Mart juggernaut.
Wal-Mart is huge, but it can be brought to heel by an aroused and organized citizenry willing to confront it in their communities, the workplace, the marketplace, the classrooms, the pulpits, the legislatures, and the voting booths. Just as the Founders rose up against the mighty British trading companies, so we can reassert our people’s sovereignty and our democratic principles over the autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart.
More of Jim Hightower's writing can be found in his monthly newletter, The Hightower Lowdown. For more information, see www.jimhightower.com.
(http://www.skolnicksreport.com)
8-26-1
Wal-Mart And The Red
Chinese Secret Police, Pt 2
Wal-Mart And The Red Chinese Secret Police, Pt 3
To understand Wal-Mart, you have to have a handle on Arkansas. And to figure out Arkansas, you have to be knowledgeable about the Rockefellers. And to fathom the Red Chinese Secret Police, you have to know a lot about the richest family in the world.
To begin. The Rockefellers like to own and operate entire states with a sizeable geography, good natural assets, and a relatively small population. That way, if need be, to win a so-called "election", they could more or less find it cheap to buy all the votes they may need to install their people. West Virginia is such a state. Like an ancient Colossus of Rhodes, astride the entrance to a harbor, the Rockefellers have a foot on both sides. On occasion, they pretend to be Democrats. Other times, as Republicans. They have installed as U.S. Senator (W.Va., D.) John D. Rockefeller 4th, great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the bloody and infamous Standard Oil Trust. Broken up by a U.S. Supreme Court decree in 1911, the Standard Oil Trust, changing its name slightly to fool novices, is back together again.
Historically, Standard Oil would bomb their own obsolete plants, to blame onto a competitor, thereby gaining public support and strangling competition. [Ida Tarbell wrote early in the 20th Century detailed accounts of Rockefeller crimes.]
As U.S. Senator he calls himself Jay to be cute. His wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, has a key position in so-called "public" broadcasting. Consequently, we call it National Petroleum Radio. NPR and PBS would never finger the Rockefellers and Big Oil. [Happily, she has no sayso whatever in local public access Cable TV, where we operate an opposition to the monopoly press.]
We have determined to our satisfaction, by confronting them, that Chicago-based Harris Bank reportedly has dozens and dozens of secret joint accounts of the Percy/Rockefeller Family with so-called "terrorist" Osama bin Laden, tied together through Mid-East construction contracts. Ha! Ha! The oil-soaked White House says they would like to freeze bin Laden's bank accounts if they can find them. Really?
Another Rockefeller owned and operated state is Arkansas. Sizeable land, small population. You cannot be so much as a successful dog-catcher there without the blessings of the Rockefellers. Several terms before Clinton, Winthrop Rockefeller was Governor. Our interviews with middle-level members of the Rockefeller Family convinces us his proper name should be WILLIAM ROCKEFELLER CLINTON. We feel certain, from all we know, that Sludge Willy is the illegitimate great grandson of the unsmiling Rockefeller patriarch.
The Rockefellers are not naive plutocrats. If there ever were ANY documents proving that Winthrop Rockefeller fathered five illegitimate children around the nation including the person who calls himself "Bill Clinton", those records, if any, have long since been destroyed.
So please, like some ninny, do not heckle us with "Where are your documents?" Until the Rockefellers are ready to throw away Bill and Hillary as no longer useful, they are untouchable. At the Senate Clinton Impeachment trial, the U.S. Senators certainly understood all this. [As an example, is it necessary for us to point out that the so-called "Watergate Affair" was touched off without a single document?]
It is surprising how some people look at a backward state like Arkansas, and yet do not wonder about the so-called great fortunes headquartered there. Tyson Chickens. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and all their subsidiaries, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA, reportedly has undercover agent reports how Tyson, in the past, has been partly financed by dope trafficking. [Of course, their major user, McDonald's, having their own problems, obviously is not interested to know. Visit our website story about McDonald's, "Coca-Cola, the CIA, and the Courts, Part 8".]
Cynics point to Puerto Rico where Tyson supposedly got some of their chickens. Was contraband tucked into some of the birds who were so old, wags claimed these chickens were eligible for Social Security pensions?
Tyson has supposedly offered their chicken preparation expertise to Red China. Really? The Chinese have been handling chickens for centuries. Do they REALLY need consulting with Tyson? Need we point out, that Southwest China, where Tyson may have visited, are producers of "China White" dope, a major export to the U.S., much, often via Chicago.
Starting about the late 1970s, the Rockefeller banks, such as the First National of Chicago, now to confuse people re-named Bank One, began loaning billions and billions of dollars to mainland China. The promise was that Red China would pay back with gold from their western provinces. BUT, China did not allow in any inspectors to determiine if there is that much gold there to be used to re-pay the loans. Instead, China has been allowed to pay back with "China White" flooding into the U.S. All the while the pressfakers keep falsely saying that most of the dope is coming from Colombia.
The American CIA, after all, are the security force worldwide protecting the assets and oilfields of the Rockefellers. So it should come as no surprise that ethnic Chinese, the Riady Family, suddenly got big in Arkansas. A money laundry vehicle has been Stephen & Co., the Rockefeller-linked bond house, second only to Wall Street, headquartered in Little Rock.
In the 1980s, the CIA was shipping through the southern states, guns to Central America, and return trips of dope. Some originating in Colombia and a few other places. It was centered around a small community in western Arkansas, Mena, and the Mena Airport. The Riadys bought the tiny First National Bank of Mena reportedly as a laundry vehicle to the Chicago markets. [Visit our extensive website stories about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange.] With the aid of the Rockefellers and through the Riadys, reportedly billions of dope dollars traveled this route.
You can understand how profound the corruption is. Instrumental in the past in covering up this massive dope smuggling has been Asa Hutchinson. Get this. He has been recently named head of the DEA.
Wal-Mart and J.B. Hunt Transport Services. Where did the funding come from in the 1980s, for them to get so big? If you think they spread out simply because they are clever, then you are a firm believer in fairy tales. In simple terms, the backward state of Arkansas, controlled by the Rockefellers, with Rockefeller-agent calling himself "Bill Clinton" (or whatever his real name is), became the shuttle point for the Red Chinese in America.
When it comes to "evidence", you have to recognize that circumstantial proof can be as powerful as paper records. How about those in murder cases sentenced to the death penalty, not by way of eyewitnesses, but only circumstantial proof, not "documents".
In its simplest terms, Wal-Mart is a front for the Rockefellers and the Red Chinese Secret Police. Do not the top honchos at Wal-Mart know that their cheap prices are based on production by Chinese slave labor, in camps and factories operated by the Secret Police? By the way, there has been a movement in the U.S. to pay reparations to the descendents of American slavery. Will there some day be a similar movement in mainland China, to compensate the families and descendents of slave laborers?
Items that other stores sell for twenty dollars are sold by Wal-Mart for ten dollars. And Wal-Mart reportedly pays only twenty cents for the item made by slave labor. There is very little about the period of the 1980s as to Wal-Mart, when the Rockefellers were installing the Chinese in Arkansas and in American business. Who was noticing when the Rockefellers were playing their China card?
Who is a major transporter for Wal-Mart and got likewise big in the 1980s? Why, J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., now headquartered in Lowell, Arkansas. Some of J.B. Hunt's drivers have confirmed to us, off the record, because they do not wish to jeopardize their good jobs: (1) that reportedly they have reason to believe on occasion they are transporting contraband, believed by them to be narcotics and (2) that state authorities, such as in Illinois, know J.B. Hunt trucks are untouchable, not to be stopped for searching such as for contraband, or suspected overloading, or any other trucking or other violations. In Illinois, the trucks are headed for a J.B. Hunt terminal in a Chicago suburb.
On their own website, www.jbhunt.com, here is how they describe their founder Johnnie Bryan Hunt, "J.B. Hunt embodies the American rags-to-riches FABLE in its most engaging personification. A living example of the AMERICAN DREAM fulfilled. He guided his billion-dollar trucking empire with the same enthusiasm and raw fortitude from which it began. But the young Hunt was an unlikely candidate for financial success of such magnitude." (Emphasis added.) [At this point is where the Rockefeller violins start playing.] "Born in 1927 to a family of sharecroppers, Hunt grew up working the cotton fields of north-central and eastern Arkansas."
We think the term FABLE is well-chosen as is the myth promoted by the monopoly press of "American Dream". On their website is the purported "History" of J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. They tell us little about how they got big in the 1980s, at the time the Rockefellers were setting up Arkansas as a Red Chinese outpost in America. And at a time when the Red Chinese Secret Police got bigger and bigger in the U.S. using their front, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., and its various units.
A few years ago, some local TV stations heckled Wal-Mart with small-time criticisms. Why? Well, Wal-Mart did not advertise much on local TV, so one way of jacking them up, is to start raising small questions about them. Wal-Mart got the message. Now that Wal-Mart advertises on TV more heavily than in the past, you can bet that stories like this one are totally unacceptable to the liars and whores of the press.
To understand the picture that Wal-Mart and other "big dealers" headquartered in Arkansas fit into, you have to study the extensive stories on our website about "THE RED CHINESE SECRET POLICE IN THE UNITED STATES". As we have stated, the Red Chinese Secret Police, since shortly after the Korean War, have been allowed, with impunity, to create murder and mayhem, on U.S. soil.
In April, 2001, a U.S. surveillance plane was forced down in an incident near mainland China. They held those from the plane hostage. For a while, some savvy sorts who know of Wal-Mart's tie to Red China and slave labor there, started a boycott of Wal-Mart stores. The monopoly press reported little if anything about this.
Why are so many Americans generally so BLANK when it comes to understanding the origins of the supposed fortunes like Wal-Mart? Many grow up knowing only what they are taught from the Establishment's propaganda school textbooks. And from what they see and hear on the mass media. Seldom is mentioned documented studies, such as Gustavus Myers "History of the Great American Fortunes", showing they were founded by the most rotten criminals who were never prosecuted and jailed as they should have been. His other heavily-documented book "History of the Supreme Court" shows our legal system, at the highest level, has been riddled with crime-committing judges. Such as the so-called renowned Chief Justice John Marshall from early in the 19th Century. His gold-framed portrait hangs in many law schools. In Chicago, a law school is named for him. Yet, as Myers documents, Chief Justice Marshall covered up on America's highest tribunal , the U.S. Supreme Court, where he presided, massive land frauds INVOLVING HIS OWN FAMILY.
Another important book is "The Corrupt Judge" by Joseph Borkin, showing how important judges were corrupted primarily in patent cases. The press whores are not about to have these books reprinted and promoted as best-sellers. You would be fortunate if you could on some dusty shelf of a public library find even one copy.
Mon Apr 29, 8:22 PM ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - A healthy bull calf born on a ranch in southeast Brazil astonished scientists who were expecting a female cloned from an adult cow.
Although not Brazil's first cloned calf, it may be the first cloned from somatic, or adult, cells. And scientists have yet to explain how they got a bull from ear cells of a cow.
The project's chief veterinarian, Jose Visintin, said on Monday the experiment "either erred in the laboratory or in the field."
"Of my two hypotheses, I hope we erred in the lab, which means we cloned a calf from somatic cells -- a first for Brazil," Visintin told a news conference at the University of Sao Paulo. "He may not be the clone we hoped for but he'd at least be a clone."
Visintin dismissed the possibility of the as-yet unnamed bull calf being from the cells his team took from the ear of an adult cow, which were supposed to be the genetic material used to create cloned embryos in the project.
"Adult cells are already sexually defined. So there is no way I can believe the bull came from the cow's ear," he said.
Visintin said there were also male bovine fetus cells in the laboratory that may have been accidentally used to create the project's embryos.
"In the scientifically less interesting hypothesis, the recipient cow may have been covered by a bull," said Visintin, who added that the cow was isolated from the herd on the farm but may have dallied with a bull without the team knowing it.
A DNA, or genetic identity, test on the calf should reveal later this week which of the two hypotheses is true.
Visintin will compare the DNA of the calf with that of the male fetus cells in the lab, the recipient cow.
The true parentage of the bull calf should predict the sex of the next two cloned calves, due in four and seven months.
"If the male calf shares the DNA of the recipient cow, which it shouldn't unless the bull got to her, then the next two clones should be female from the donor cow's ear cells like we intended," said Visintin.
"If the bull calf is mistakenly from the male bovine fetus cells in the lab, then the next two clones when they are born will be bulls, too, and his identical brothers."
New York scientists unveil robo-rat
02.05.2002
(UKIndependent)
The age of the robotic rodent is upon us. A study has shown the movements of a live rat can be controlled by using a laptop computer, a radio and a set of microelectrodes implanted into the animal's brain.
"Ratbot", as the creature has been named, could one day be used to rescue earthquake victims buried under rubble, seek out land mines or even, with the help of miniature video cameras, spy inside secret installations.
Scientists used brain implants and tiny radio "backpacks" to guide five rats through a complex maze, composed of ladders, steps, hoops and ramps, from a distance of more than 500 yards.
Human operators were able to steer the Ratbots through the obstacle course as if they were guiding intelligent robots, said Sanjiv Talwar, a researcher at the State University of New York, who helped to run the study, published in the journal Nature.
"One can think of the guided rat as a very good robot platform capable of traversing terrain that modern robots are unable to do," Dr Talwar said yesterday.
The experiment involved exploiting the principle that an animal can be trained to do tasks by stimulating "reward" regions of the brain that normally respond to food, drink and sex.
Professor Patrick Bateson, an expert on animal behaviour at Cambridge University, said: "It's been known for a long time that animals will work like anything to get these rewards."
In conventional animal training, a morsel of food can be used as a reward "re- inforcement". In laboratory tests going back 40 years scientists have shown that direct electrical stimulation of the brain's pleasure centres is just as good or even better.
In this latest experiment, microelectrodes implanted directly into the reward centre of the rat's brain – a region called the medial forebrain bundle – were stimulated each time the rat made a move in the "correct" direction.
At the same time, the scientists implanted another set of electrodes into the brain regions receiving nerve impulses from the right and left set of whiskers. The rats were trained to move to each side depending on which set of whiskers was stimulated. If they did it correctly they were given a "reward" to the medial forebrain bundle.
The rats also quickly learnt to associate the stimulation of their brains' reward centres with simply walking forwards, even if this involved climbing or descending ladders or steps, or moving into the centre of a brightly lit room – something that most rats would avoid.
Dr Talwar said, however, that there were clear limits to what each rat could be made to do. "The rats worked within their instincts. They appeared to finely calibrate their awareness of a difficult obstacle versus the pleasure they would receive if they overcame it," he said.
Nevertheless, the rats were easily guided through pipes and across elevated runways and ledges, and could be instructed to climb, or jump from, any surface with a good foothold, such as a tree, the scientists write in Nature.
"We were also able to guide rats in systematically exploring large, collapsed piles of concrete rubble, and to direct them through environments that they would normally avoid, such as brightly lit, open areas," they say.
John Chapin, the leader of the research team and professor of physiology and pharmacology at the State University of New York, said that the rats could be made to "search" for an hour without showing any signs of getting tired or bored. "A search-and-rescue dog costs $60,000 [£43,000] to maintain and you cannot use them in very tight spaces," Dr Chapin said. "Nor could you use a dog to discover land mines, since the weight of the animal would detonate the explosive. A rat, however, being small and light, could sit on the mine without exploding it.
"In addition, rats are more mobile than mechanical robots, which are often stymied by obstacles such as fences, rocks and debris. While robots would be useful in environments where a living thing could not survive, such as where there are fires or poisonous gases, the rat has rather sophisticated navigational skills developed over 200 million years of evolution. It makes sense to make good use of the animal's abilities," Dr Chapin said.
The Chapin team published work in 1999 showing that rats could be trained to operate a robotic arm using the power of thought alone.
In this experiment, each rat had microelectrodes implanted into the region of the brain that controlled the movement of its limbs. The animals were then trained to operate a lever with a foot to release food.
After a period of time, the operation of the lever was taken over by a mechanical arm and each rat quickly learnt that the mere thought of using its limbs to operate the lever still resulted in access to the food.
Another set of experiments a year later on monkeys showed that the same principle could be applied to primates. In this test the scientists even managed to get the monkeys to use mind control to operate robotic arms over the internet some 600 miles away.
One aim of the research is to develop a means whereby severely paralysed patients could control the movements of robot arms and other devices by the power of thought alone.
According to Dr Talwar, the latest work on Ratbot could lead to a way of controlling a robotic arm with the extra help of the sense of touch.
"The larger idea behind the study was to continue our research in neurorobotics," Dr Talwar said. "We wanted to get an idea about how effectively can animals sense brain- stimulation cues. This would enable us to evaluate the feasibility of a 'sensory' prosthesis, which could enable paralysed patients to experience sensations such as touch and so be able to better control an artificial limb through a suitable brain-machine interface," he said.
If this research continues to advance, the age of Ratbot could be a prelude to the day when paralysed humans could operate artificial limbs, just like the half-human cyborgs of science fiction.
- INDEPENDENT
If you put one in a little superman costume could he be in the next movie?
(WINS) May 1, 2002 12:51 pm US/Eastern
NEW YORK (AP) -- Set in a Gotham-like city overwrought by ecological disaster, URINETOWN: The Musical is a tale of greed, corruption, love and revolution in a time when water is worth its very weight in gold. A depletion of the earth's water supply has led to a government-enforced ban on private toilets. The privilege of pee is regulated by a single, malevolent corporation, which profits by charging admission for one of mankind's most basic needs.
Well, we're not quite there yet but Mayor Michael Bloomberg says upgrading the city's water restrictions will be necessary unless upstate reservoirs receive 15 more inches of rain in the next several weeks.
Despite recent rains, the city's reservoirs are at 65 percent capacity. They should be 90 percent full this time of year, Bloomberg said Tuesday.
The city is considering going to a Stage 2 emergency. The stiffer restrictions would prohibit the watering of lawns and allow only public pools to be filled. Under the current Stage 1 rules, lawns can be watered during designated times.
I have a theory that every American 'celeb' has a British equivalent. (see Geoffrey Lewis and Geoffrey Palmer)I guess this show's writer's would be Ben Elton.
(AP )Apr 30, 2002
NEW YORK -- A Queens couple who placed their 16-month-old daughter on a strict vegetarian diet was charged with child endangerment after authorities found her near death, at only half her normal weight, the Queens District Attorney announced Monday.
Joseph Swinton, 31, and Silva Swinton, 31, of Queens Village are charged with reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child, District Attorney Richard Brown said. They face up to seven years in jail if convicted.
The couple were arraigned Friday and both pleaded not guilty. Bail was set at $20,000 each which they had not met by Monday night, authorities said. They are scheduled to appear in court on May 13.
Authorities were alerted to the situation by an anonymous call in November, said Maris Campbell, a spokeswoman for the district attorney. She said an EMS worker took the baby, who was "in grave risk of death," to the emergency room at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
Prosecutors say the couple fed the baby ground nuts, fresh-squeezed juices, herbal tea, beans, cod liver oil and flax seed oil. She was not breast-fed or given infant formulas.
The complaint charges the baby had no teeth, low muscle tone, a distended abdomen and had difficulty moving her arms and legs.
The district attorney called the case "heartbreaking and among the worst cases of child neglect I have ever seen. She weighed only 10 pounds, less than half the weight of an average 16-month-old female child, and appeared to be the size of a 2- to 3-month-old baby," Brown said.
But Warren Silverman, a lawyer representing the mother said the parents "felt that they have their own lifestyle, they're vegetarians, and they felt that they were providing proper care for their child."
He also questions why there was such a long delay to file charges against the parents.
"If Long Island Jewish hospital at that time thought that something was amiss, why wasn't something done right away?" he said. "If it was so patently obvious, you would have thought that someone would have arrested them immediately."
The father was being represented by the Legal Aid Society, which did not immediately return a phone call from The Associated Press.
The child has been in foster care since November. Born on July 31, 2000, the girl is now 20 months old. Doctors said she now weighs 20 pounds, about the normal weight of a 10- to 12-month old baby, but warn that she faces major developmental problems, Campbell said.
These people should be put in stocks.
LONDON (Reuters) - Hounded by British protesters and pursued by a Spanish judge over knowledge of past crimes of South American dictatorships, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said Wednesday mistakes were "possibly" made.
But Kissinger -- whose visit to London drew about 200 anti-capitalist protesters calling him a "war criminal" and scuffling with police -- questioned if courts were the best place to investigate the U.S. government's past behavior.
"No one can say that he served in an administration that did not make mistakes," Kissinger told a business conference in London of his time in government, as demonstrators chanted "shame" and held a mock trial of him on the pavement outside.
"Decisions made in high office are usually 51-49 decisions so it is quite possible that mistakes were made."
German-born Kissinger, who fled Nazi rule to the United States, served as President Richard Nixon's national security adviser from 1969 to 1973 and as Secretary of State between 1973 and 1977 under Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford.
A Spanish judge has asked international police Interpol to question him over what he knew about "Operation Condor," a plan by military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay to persecute opponents during the 1970s and 1980s.
"The issue is whether, 30 years after the event, the courts are the appropriate means by which determination is made. If it is left to the individual judgment of individual judges who in turn are given so-called information from interest groups, the very concept of universal jurisdiction will be undermined," Kissinger added.
WASHINGTON WOULD RESPOND FIRST
He said he was willing if necessary to be questioned but Washington would respond before him.
"It is not a refusal on my part to answer questions, it is to permit the United States government to collect the information which it has and to respond," he said after a speech to the Institute of Directors conference.
Outside London's Royal Albert Hall demonstrators from anti-capitalist and left-wing groups mocked a huge effigy of Kissinger and held photographs of people who disappeared during the rule of Chile's ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet.
"He is the world's biggest war criminal," Guy Taylor of the Globalize Resistance group told Reuters. Two protesters were arrested, and others dragged away by police as they tried to block traffic and prevent delegates from entering.
The demonstrators said as well as South America, Kissinger bore responsibility for U.S. involvement in other international "crimes" at the time he was in government including carpet-bombing in Cambodia and prolonging the Vietnam War.
Veteran British activist Peter Tatchell pledged Wednesday to continue pursuing legal action against Kissinger despite a London court's throwing out for the second time his application for an arrest warrant.
"He may have escaped arrest this time, but my bid to have him prosecuted continues," he said.
During his speech Kissinger, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, urged caution on the West's mooted military moves against Iraq, and greater U.S.-European cooperation over the Middle East.
Henry Kissinger=Dennis Healy?
The Guardian - London
4-29-2
British scientists have caught bacteria in the act of passing information to each other - The discovery could throw new light on the spread of antibiotic resistance in hospitals.
Mathematical physicist Alan Parsons and biologist Richard Heal, work for QinetiQ - formerly the Ministry of Defence science laboratory - at Winfrith in Dorset. They report in the Journal of Applied Microbiology that they grew separated colonies of bacteria, one in an ordinary nutrient, one in a dish of food that had been spiked with antibiotic.
At first, the medicinally-treated bacteria began to die. If they were totally sealed off from the healthy bacteria next door, they would all die. But if there was a small gap through which air could pass between the two colonies, the ailing bacteria would recover.
The only conclusion could be that the healthy, stable bacteria next door were sending their stricken cousins some kind of survival advice - in the form of information about antibiotic resistance.
"If these unstressed bacteria are present then we find that the bacteria that are attacked by the antibiotic actually do not die. A large proportion of them survive and they begin to recover," Professor Parsons said.
"It happens in a few hours. We first discovered this a year ago and have done a great many controlled tests to throw out other possibilities."
"We have only tried it on two bacteria that happened to be available. It worked with both. But there are obviously thousands of other strains and species we haven't tried.
"We don't know if this thing exists between the pathogenic bacteria that hospitals are interested in. This is something we would like to find out. It would be surprising if they did not have some similar capacity."
The means by which bacteria pass messages to each other is so far unknown. The guess is that signals could be carried by airborne molecules released by microbes.
Prof Parsons and Dr Heal speculated that bacteria were sending electromagnetic signals to each other, but ruled out this possibility after they found that the effect only occurred when the two colonies were linked by a passage of air.
Winfrith is a centre for research into naval sonar and underwater acoustics. The two scientists had been experimenting with bacteria as "living sensors" which could register acoustic pressure. The discovery that the microbes could signal to each other through the air was completely unexpected.
If confirmed in experiments with the kind of infectious bacteria that spread pneumonia or blood poisoning, or other life threatening illnesses, the discovery could have profound consequences.
But there was a twist. The two scientists found the same result when they used three kinds of antibiotics - but not with a fourth variety, from a different class.
"So clearly, some antibiotics are effective against the signal, and some not," said Prof Parsons.
"It is absolutely fascinating and astonishing. I don't have a picture of it yet. We don't know what the signal is, we don't know how it activates the resistance mechanism in the stressed bacteria. That has to be sorted out. We are very keen to pursue this further."
* Bacteria reproduce by dividing. This can happen every 15 minutes. In a day and a half, with sufficient food, one microbe's progeny could outweigh the Earth.
* Around 20bn E coli grow in the intestine of every human being every day.
* The total number of bacteria on Earth is estimated to exceed 5m trillion trillion.
* Certain species are able to withstand fierce radiation, flourish in boiling water, survive at sub-zero temperatures, multiply in acid or alkali, and eat concrete.
* Bacteria have been found underneath polar ice, in stratospheric clouds, and in rocks far below the ocean floor.
* Antibiotic resistance is now a worldwide problem. Strains of three life-threatening microbes are now resistant to more than 100 antibiotics.
"Quick use your invincibility spell"
(WASHTIMES-notes from the pentagon)
Several intelligence analysts have reached the conclusion that the latest tape of Osama bin Laden was purposely made to look recent, but in fact was made months ago.
The CIA has not made an official assessment. But most who have seen the tape believe it was made weeks after the September 11 attacks on America, but before the war in Afghanistan began Oct. 7.
Last week, the Arab-language Al Jazeera televised the latest tape of bin Laden, who appeared to be sitting outside, next to his top aide, Egyptian surgeon Ayman al Zawahiri. The tape was part of a "documentary" on bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network.
Analysts believe a tape meant to look recent is, in fact, old for several reasons.
In the last-known dated tape of bin Laden made in early December, he appears thin, gray and emotionally stressed. His left arm remains motionless during the entire 33-minute production. His voice is weak.
In the Al Jazeera tape, he appears plump, less gray and composed. His left arm moves freely. "He looks better in that tape than the one we know about in December," said one official.
Also, if the tape were more recent, bin Laden likely would have referred to current events in the news, which he does not.
Some film analysts believe the backdrop of grass, a stream and mountains was dubbed into the tape to make the date appear as spring.
Now, the big question is why would al Qaeda supporters go to so much trouble to try to prove to the world that bin Laden is alive and healthy? Some analysts conclude the effort means bin Laden is incapacitated or perhaps dead.
2002-04-29
(PRAVDA)
The Washington Post reports that Osama bin Laden’s location has been determined. He and his aide Ayman Zawahiri are in the village of Maidan in Pakistan province of North Waziristan, commander from Afghan intelligence Hazrat Uddin in the Host province told an American newspaper.
Uddin said that, according to available information, bin Laden and Zawahiri were seen in the village yesterday. In addition, at least a week ago, bin Laden was seen in Peshawar. The US HQ in Afghanistan has not confirmed the information. The Afghani government reported that 1,200 US and British commandos have landed on the Afghan – Pakistani border, in Gergerai, three days ago. They were involved in searching for bin Laden and Zawahiri. The mountainous region of Gergerai is controlled by Pastun tribes living on both sides of the border.
It is hard to say whether the information is reliable. Indeed, information about bin Laden’s location has recently become very frequent; almost every week new sightings appear. It is more likely that, this time, it is wishful thinking again and not reality. None of the previous reports of bin Laden’s location have been confirmed.
On the other hand, bin Laden and his followers may be hiding only in the regions slightly controlled or uncontrolled by the central authorities of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To tell the truth, there are many regions of this kind in both states. Therefore, the number one terrorist may be in any of them. Probably, the US HQ in Afghanistan prefers to abstain from commenting on any searching operations for the success of the operation. However, if bin Laden was actually in the village, he must have already escaped by now.
In any case, the search for Osama bin Laden will go on until final victory. Nobody is sure how much time and effort this is going to take. It is highly probable that it will take several years. Time will tell whether the operation in Gergerai will be a success.
Presumably not at a Wal-mart
(londonEveningstandard)
The town, famous for once hanging a shipwrecked monkey on suspicion of being a french spy, saw Stuart Drummond, also known as H'Angus the Monkey, storm to victory in the race for Mayor.
H'Angus is better known for his outrageous antics acting as mascot for Hartlepool United Football Club. He campaigned for free bananas to schoolchildren.
His pitch-side persona has courted controversy which has resulted in him being ejected from two away grounds - once for allegedly simulating sex with a female steward at Scunthorpe, the second for acting improperly with an inflatable doll at Blackpool.
But he has stepped firmly into the political arena, riding high on a pre-election platform of free bananas to schoolchildren. He beat the Labour candidate by 603 votes in the second round.
It was clear he was about to throw a banana skin under the electoral process when he topped the first round of the fierce contest at the polling count station at Mill House Leisure Centre in Hartlepool.
Mr Drummond said: "I would like to thank the people of Hartlepool who voted for me. Forget about the monkey. The monkey was there only for promotion purposes. The monkey was just for publicity.
"I am Stuart Drummond, I am the Mayor of Hartlepool, not the monkey. I am an Independent, but that doesn't mean I will not listen to views from every party. Hartlepool is a great town and with your help I would like to make it better."
H'Angus put his outrageous antics behind him tonight as he stepped firmly into the political arena to take the £53,000-a-year post, which he will hold for three years.
May 2, 2002
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- Broadcasters who lost transmission facilities when the World Trade Center collapsed are eyeing Jersey City or Governors Island in New York as the site of a 2,000-foot-tall tower that would be the world's tallest free-standing structure.
The two sites are being proposed for the hour-glass-shaped toward because it would have to be located no more than 3.2 miles from the former trade center site in order to avoid interfering with broadcasting in other nearby cities.
"It's a very beautiful form that could be a great asset to the entire New York area," said A. Eugene Kohn, one of a team of four architects who drew up plans for the tower. "It could be a symbolic replacement for the World Trade towers on the New York skyline, which are sorely missed."
His firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox, was hired by the Metropolitan TV Alliance, a trade group representing 10 New York-area stations. The broadcasters urgently need new transmission facilities to replace the antenna that fell when the trade center's north tower collapsed.
"They must have a tower to have a telecast," said Phil Roberts, executive director of the New Jersey Broadcasters Association. "It has put high-definition TV on the back burner because they don't have the tower. And aside from high-definition TV, they're having trouble broadcasting regular TV right now."
Broadcasters have temporarily relocated their antennas to the Empire State Building. But that location isn't high enough and doesn't allow for a signal strong enough to reach the entire metropolitan region.
The broadcasters also estimate that 350,000 homes in New York City still have no reception or an unclear signal.
William Baker, president and CEO of WNET, who heads the TV Alliance, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment on the plan Thursday.
Architects envision an open-air concrete and steel tower encircled by crisscrossing 10-inch steel cables. The project could cost between $150 million and $200 million, but part of the cost would be offset by locating a restaurant and observation deck at about 1,300 feet and retail shops around the base.
Kohn said the tower could become a tourist attraction similar to the 1,815-foot-tall CN Tower in Toronto, which is the tallest free-standing structure in the world. Most of that tower is hollow, but the base and top include observation decks, restaurants, retail shops, an arcade and a movie theater.
The world's tallest occupied building is the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 1,483 feet. The World Trade Center's roofs were 1,360 feet above ground level, and the antenna on the north tower reached to 1,728 feet.
Kohn said he doesn't think the tower would become a tempting target for terrorists because it would not have nearly as many occupants as a large office building.
"Everyone's sensitive about building anything tall right now, but if you think about it, in addition to destroying a symbol, the terrorists also wanted to kill a lot of people and do a lot of damage," he said.
Jersey City officials said they support the concept of the tower, but want to hear more details.
The project would require numerous layers of approvals. In addition to local zoning and planning reviews, the state Department of Environmental Protection would have to evaluate it, and the Federal Aviation Administration would have to review the plans to make sure the tower does not interfere with flights in and out of the region.
Al Ivany, a DEP spokesman, said no plans have yet been filed with the state. Kohn said he did not know when formal applications might be ready for submission.
Roberts predicted the Governors Island site might ultimately be judged more feasible than Jersey City.
"The not-in-my-backyard factor will dictate that it can't be where anybody lives," he said. "Think of where there wouldn't be that problem: on an island in the middle of a river."
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