(Aerospace Daily)
7-11-2
The Department of Defense should set up an early warning center so the information it collects about asteroids, comets and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) can quickly be shared with other countries, according to Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon "Pete" Worden, deputy director for operations at U.S. Space Command.
Worden said July 10 at a Capitol Hill space round-table that a June incident involving an asteroid over the Mediterranean Sea underscored the need for a center to warn about natural objects that could cross Earth's orbit. When the asteroid, estimated at five to 10 meters in diameter, collided with the Earth's atmosphere, it released a burst of energy comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.
If the June 6 burst had occurred over India or Pakistan, which were on the brink of war at the time, it could have been mistaken for a military attack, pushing the two countries into a full-scale conflict, he said.
"Neither of those nations has the sophisticated sensors we do that can determine the difference between a natural NEO impact and a nuclear detonation," Worden said. "The resulting panic in the nuclear-armed and hair-trigger militaries there could have been the spark" for a nuclear war.
DOD currently gives NEO information to foreign countries on an informal basis, a process that can take weeks. Formalizing the process with a new early warning center could expedite that process, Worden said.
A recent study concluded that such a center could be formed with just five to 10 people at U.S. space facilities in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., Worden added. While the center would need only a modest amount of equipment to get started, it likely would influence the requirements for the next-generation space surveillance system now under development. At the moment, DOD has not given anyone the go-ahead to set up such a center.
Worden also said that the U.S. should step up efforts to develop microsatellites, which can be produced and launched with far less money and time than regular satellites. Microsatellites could collect detailed information about a specific NEO, including its internal structure. Such information could be critical to figuring out how to divert the NEO from Earthís path.
Building a new set of ground-based telescopes that are three meters in diameter also would be helpful because it would allow the U.S. to scan the entire sky every few weeks, according to Worden. The nationís most effective NEO sensor, MITís Lincoln Lab LINEAR facility in New Mexico, misses many NEOs because its main optics are only one meter in diameter.
Another roundtable speaker, Colleen Hartman, director of NASA's solar system exploration division, said 602 NEOs with a diameter of one kilometer or more have been identified, a number that could grow to as many as 1,080 with further study. The U.S. has focused its detection efforts on such large NEOs because they could cause a global catastrophe. NASA is studying ways to detect smaller ones, which could number in the hundreds of thousands, because they still could cause serious devastation, Hartman said.
(AustralianAdvertiser)
12jul02
FORMER US president Bill Clinton has stolen the show at the world AIDS conference after laughingly conjuring up the idea of condoms brandishing the Nike logo.
Clinton took part in a "town hall forum" of present and former world leaders who aired their views about the global AIDS crisis in Barcelona, Spain.
He was jokingly urged by the meeting's Thai moderator to encourage the US sportswear maker Nike to start marketing its own contraceptive to help promote anti-HIV practices among the young.
"If in fact Nike got into the condom business, someone would have a field day with their logo," Clinton quipped.
A highly popular figure among AIDS activists, Clinton is guest-of-honour alongside former South African president Nelson Mandela for the closing ceremonies of the 14th International AIDS Conference.
During his visit, Clinton singled out US Senator Jesse Helms for praise.
The arch-conservative veteran was a perpetual thorn in the former president's side during the Clinton era.
But, in his last months in office, Helms has issued a surprising mea culpa about his stance on AIDS, saying he was now aware of the seriousness of the pandemic and wanted the United States to commit an additional $US500 million ($887 million) to fight it.
Clinton said the Irish rock singer Bono, a campaigner for debt relief for the Third World, "taught me ... I should never presuppose that I could not convince anyone to do the right thing on an issue of real humanitarian magnitude.
"It's amazing that Senator Helms, on his way out of the Senate, wanted to put another $US500 million into the fight against AIDS. I think that's an example of what we can do if we don't write anyone off and give everyone a chance to work together."
Clinton also suggested that the poorest countries should not shrink from sidestepping drugs companies and buying cheap generic copies of their HIV products in Brazil, India and other countries sympathetic to their plight.
Such moves are fiercely opposed by the pharmaceutical lobby as a discouragement in research and development.
Clinton said poor countries should turn to generics if they fail to get an acceptable price deal with the pharmaceutical industry.
They should also turn to rich countries with a detailed request to help them make up the financial difference between their own resources and the cost of meeting their needs, he said.
(Scotsman)
Thu 11 Jul 2002
BILL Clinton, the former US president, was at the centre of more embarrassing accusations about his infidelity last night, when he was accused of fathering a secret love-child.
Mr Clinton is being asked to take a DNA test to determine if he is the father of an alleged former lover’s child - and it could be the final straw for his troubled marriage.
If he refuses to submit to the test voluntarily, he will be taken to court and forced to provide DNA samples in what would be yet another highly embarrassing incident for him and his wife, Hillary, a New York senator, who has stood by her husband through repeated affairs.
The paternity battle began when Paul Pearson, a retired lawyer, from Dallas, Texas, demanded to know if the famously unfaithful former president is the real father of his son, Anthony, 20.
Paul Pearson’s ex-wife, Dolly Kyle Browning, a friend of Mr Clinton since childhood, admitted to a 17-year affair with the former president prior to giving birth to Anthony in 1981.
The couple were married from 1975 to 1985, but Mr Pearson, 55, said that, during their relationship, they were infrequently intimate.
He told the US tabloid National Enquirer: "It’s time for Bill Clinton to face the music, he needs to settle this issue for good, and the only way is through a DNA test. It’s the right and decent thing to do."
He added: "I knew that Bill Clinton and my wife were involved before we were married because she would boast about it," said Mr Pearson. "But she promised me that their relationship was over - and like a fool, I believed her.
"By the time our son was born, everyone was telling me she was cheating, including Dolly’s own daughters. Almost everyone I knew was trying to convince me that she and Bill were having an affair.
"Once it finally sank in that she was cheating with Bill before Anthony was born, of course I questioned whether he was my son. Who wouldn’t?"
It is not the first time Mr Clinton has faced a paternity suit. In 1999, a prostitute from Arkansas claimed that Clinton fathered her son, then 13, but tests proved negative.
Mr Pearson’s determination to set the record straight is causing shockwaves in the Clinton marriage, insiders say.
One source said: "He’s already sworn to her that Anthony Pearson is not his child, and, so far, she [Hillary] has believed him.
"When she gets the news of the DNA demand, she will be furious. It will be the final scandal as far as she is concerned."
Anthony Pearson could end up with about a third of the former president’s estimated $30 million fortune if his son does turn out to be a Clinton.
Who are these maids?
(http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=16767)
Fatima Al-Ghamdi/ Al-Bilad
Normally if people want a maid, they contact a recruitment office and arrange the matter with the office.
This is what I thought was usual until I learned from some women that there is another way of hiring a maid. The service is provided by expatriate women over the phone and if you know the rules, the maid will be delivered to your door and you will never have to deal with the bureaucracy and red-tape in those offices.
First, however, you have to get the number of one of the women and then you have to win her trust.
After getting a few numbers from friends, I began the process. The first women I called hung up the moment she heard my voice.
I called again and told her I wanted a maid.
“We don’t have maids,” she answered harshly.
I tried the other numbers and the answer was always the same. I told one woman who finally listened to me that I had got her number from a friend.
Her manner changed at once and she began to question me. She wanted to know whether I had a job so there would be no problem about money.
When I told her to write down my number, she said that she had it since it was recorded on her caller ID.
What she did need to know, however, was where my house was located.
The women who provide maids for people work very discreetly and quietly.
Most of them live in old neighborhoods with narrow alleys and lanes which make it almost impossible to locate a house.
In any case, they will never answer the door unless thorough identification is provided and a careful check is done.
The problem is that their work is not only providing maids.
Some also work as midwives, conducting illegal abortions and even practicing other kinds of medicine. They use taxis to move about and dress like Saudi women, covering their faces, arms and hands.
Where have these people come from?
Where do the maids they provide come from? Do they enter the Kingdom as pilgrims and then slip away? Who provides them with shelter and facilitates their movement from city to city?
Many questions are asked but very few answers are forthcoming.
(NYPOST)
July 10, 2002 --
COMEDY Central funnyman Jon Stewart is taking his act worldwide - via CNN.
Stewart, who hosts "The Daily Show," will host "The Daily Show: Global Edition," a half-hour weekly show airing on CNN International beginning on Sept. 21.
"Global Edition" will air Saturdays and Sundays in most overseas regions and will be comprised of bits culled from that weeks' worth of "Daily Show."
"We will take the best segments which have relevance for an international audience like the headlines and the best of his celebrity interviews," said CNN International spokesman Nigel Pritchard.
AOL Time Warner owns CNN and part of Comedy Central (with Viacom).
" 'The Daily Show' has no topicality internationally and no relevance for an audience outside the U.S.," Pritchard said.
"We like the format of the show and Jon is a very good host . . . but we're using the style of the show. It's not because of Jon but because of the program."
"The Daily Show" airs weekdays at 11 p.m.
(CBS.MarketWatch.com)
7-10-2
When gold stocks rise sharply as a group on extremely heavy volume, it's almost always a sign of trouble ahead for the overall stock market.
Analysts say the 7.5 percent advance for U.S.-traded gold shares this week -- the sector's largest increase since May 2000 -- points to renewed interest in the metal. It's also a sign investors accept the possibility that the stock market, and the few industries still holding onto gains this year, could come crashing down in coming days or weeks.
Gold's price, subdued until this week, is up almost 20 percent from 12 months ago. The spot price on Wednesday morning in New York was $315 an ounce, down $1.40 after an almost a gain of $4 the previous day. Trading activity in top gold mining companies like Newmont Mining (NEM), Gold Fields Ltd. (GFI), and Barrick Gold (ABX) is regularly exceeding the stocks' three-month volume averages.
Analysts and newsletter writers say the metal and corresponding shares have the winners at a time when the stock market and the U.S. dollar are the losers. What is new is the belief that the metal's gains, and those of gold mining companies, are telltale signs of an impending stock-market meltdown.
"What the market seems to be saying is that we've seen the end of Wall Street's oversold relief rally, and the resumption of gold's bull trend," said Bob Bishop, the longtime editor of Gold Mining Stock Report (www.goldminingstockreport.com). "I'm guessing that (the July 5) lows in many gold stocks are likely to be the lows for some time, principally because of the amount of bad news that appears to be baked in the cake of the broader market and the U.S. dollar. That's good for gold, and bad for U.S. stocks and the dollar."
Gold shares Wednesday morning were down a little more than 1 percent, as measured by the XAU (XAU) index of major miners.
Barry Cooper, gold mining analyst at CIBC World Markets in Toronto, is convinced gold's gains will proceed lockstep with the fall of the dollar against other major currencies, such as the euro. The euro is flirting with the $1 level for the first time since January 2000.
The rise of gold mining shares "suggests the broader markets are not that healthy, but most people could have surmised that," says Cooper. "The equities have been leaders to bullion for the past while so I would expect we will see some further strength coming." One of Cooper's top gold stocks, Canada's Goldcorp. (GG), staged a 9 percent gain in a single day this week.
Joseph Duarte, a Dallas fund manager and author of "Successful Energy Sector Investing," says the mining companies' stellar stock-market gains this year bode poorly for other industries. "Gold is the refuge du jour, because there isn't any place else to run. Hospitals, HMOs, drugs, banks, oil -- everything that is 'safe' is getting clobbered," Duarte said Wednesday.
Homebuilder stocks were one of the few industries holding onto substantial gains this year. No more. "Look at the charts of the home builders, especially Toll Brothers (TOL) and Ryland Group (RYL). These stocks are clearly under heavy selling pressure, suggesting that even these invincible stocks are being abandoned. That may well be the sign that indeed capitulation is either here or just around the corner, as when people are truly getting scared."
Not everyone expects a surge for gold this summer, traditionally a weak season for jewelry sales. James Turk, founder of payment system GoldMoney.com and a longtime precious metals newsletter editor, sees a trading range of $300 to $320 an ounce for gold "in the next 2-3 months, then gold makes another attempt to hurdle $325 in September or October."
Mike Darda, an economist at Polyconomics Inc. in Parsippany, N.J., sees a "slight upward bias" for dollar-gold prices, "but not a bias that will cause the price to rise by leaps and bounds. We'd need an attack on Iraq for that -- and we still think that prospect remains remote." Polyconomics sees gold prices moved most by the supply and demand for currency and bank reserves, which are influenced in turn by tax policy expectations and geopolitical developments.
"For gold to fall hard, we would need to see a turn in U.S. fiscal policy (i.e., a cut in the capital-gains tax) or another big downshift in global political risk," Darda says. John C. Doody, editor of Gold Stock Analyst (www.goldstockanalyst.com) expects that gold mining shares will continue to reflect gains in the metal. The "rule of thumb is a 1 percent change in gold price yields a 3 percent change in stock price," says Doody. "This is because the price increase adds directly to the bottom line, or takes from it if the price falls.
Witness the recent $15-an-ounce slide, or 5 percent, that saw most stocks off 15 percent to 20 percent."
Higher gold prices provide gold miners with more cash flow from their annual production. Investors in turn are more willing to pay a higher price for a miner's reserves, generally 10 times annual production for the best companies. "The price increase," he says, "makes all the reserves more profitable and may make marginal ounces profitable now, which weren't economic at a lower price."
Pension Fund Disaster;Stocks, Dollar To Free Fall, Gold To Skyrocket
(By Michael C. Ruppert copvcia.com)
7-8-2
Jul 11
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has returned to its old ways of bursting budgets and so New York's landmark national debt clock lit up again on Thursday after a two-year hiatus, whizzing higher by $30 a second.
A spatter of puzzled pedestrians stared up in the morning sun's glare near the bustling corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street near Times Square as workers switched on a massive 11-by-26-foot digital clock that had lay dormant for nearly two years.
After taking a few seconds for the 13-digit figure to sharpen, the sign read $6.1 trillion, or $66,791 per U.S. household, and immediately began ticking higher.
"It's frightening -- really frightening," said Ruth Davis, 48, a native New Yorker, who paused from reading her newspaper at a table in Bryant Park, located across the busy intersection, and cast a glance up at the sign.
"When I looked at it yesterday, I thought, 'Gee, we must have paid off the national debt because the sign wasn't on'."
Since it was shut down and covered in September 2000, when the government was flush with budget surpluses, the national debt has rocketed up by nearly half a trillion dollars and Congress has lifted the borrowing limit to $6.4 trillion from $5.95 trillion.
First erected in 1989 by the late New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, the sign is lit by about 500 bulbs and costs roughly $2,000 a month to maintain.
Durst, who died in 1995, first put it up to help make Americans more aware of how much future generations would owe if the government continued borrowing at a dizzying pace.
After four years of surpluses that came as stock markets boomed and government purses tightened, the White House officially projected a $106 billion deficit this year.
But officials said late on Wednesday the Bush administration will release new budget projections next week showing higher budget deficits in part because of the recent stock market slide.
Many Wall Street analysts think this year's shortfall could top $200 billion.
"I'm concerned about it for my daughter, my 10-year old," said Ernest Viotty, 57, who works nearby and stopped to watch workers climb up a boom lifted up over storefronts to turn on the sign. "Our children are getting the bill."
(Newsweek)
8th July 2002
Does the United States have the skull of one of Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants, or even bin Laden himself? If not, why the mystery about what we have found?
In early may, Canadian troops came across a grave site at the Afghan village of Ali Khel near Tora Bora on the border with Pakistan. The cluster of graves was festooned with flags and banners, and lit at night. Villagers said the graves held the remains of Qaeda fighters killed in December in the battle for Tora Bora. Bin Laden and his top aides were in the area when the 17-day U.S. air assault began but he hasn’t been provably seen since. Could he be buried at Ali Khel?
A U.S. Army forensic team, hastily airlifted to the site, unearthed 23 bodies, from which it took “samples” before reburying them. Mystery No. 1: what samples? The story at the time (repeated last week by a spokesman at the U.S. military HQ in Afghanistan) was that these were tissue samples, bound for the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, where DNA would be extracted to identify the dead. Previous samples from Afghanistan had been sent there in February. “But we never got the Tora Bora material in May,” says institute spokesman Chris Kelly. Mystery No. 2: where are the Tora Bora samples? A spokesman at U.S. Central Command’s Tampa, Fla., HQ says his info was that they went to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command in Washington, D.C. “Not us,” says CIC spokesman Marc Raimondi. “We don’t have those sort of facilities.” Dead end? Not quite. The small world of forensic pathology is abuzz with the rumor that the Tora Bora remains were taken secretly to the FBI lab at Quantico, Va., and that the FBI has called in the Smithsonian because among the remains is a skull. Too Gothic? “I will just confirm that the lab is working on items recovered from that area,” says FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. “They are currently performing analysis on some things that have been recovered from over in that area. But I don’t want to get into specifics.” Has the FBI called in the Smithsonian? “It is not at all uncommon for us to collaborate with the Smithsonian and the work of [forensic expert] Dr. [Douglas] Ubelaker on many cases that come through our lab,” says Bresson. Is there a skull? “There wouldn’t be anything we would be able to share as far as specific items that might or might not have been recovered,” says Bresson. Over to the Smithsonian. Ubelaker, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian, is a renowned forensic sleuth and consultant to the FBI. His specialty is the reconstruction of faces from skull fragments. Ubelaker declined to speak. “He has a rule that he won’t comment on active investigations,” says Smithsonian spokesman Randall Kremer, adding: “He does keep his work secret. Not even we here know.”
Seems the african eve was more like Anne Robinson
(Reuters)
LOS ANGELES (July 11) - The man who videotaped a police beating near Los Angeles that enraged black leaders and then dodged a grand jury inquiry into the matter was arrested on Thursday as he prepared to grant a television interview.
Mitchell Crooks was taken into custody on warrants issued in northern California for petty theft and drunken driving. Authorities also served him with a subpoena to testify before the Los Angeles County grand jury.
Crooks' arrest was videotaped and broadcast on local KCAL-TV, showing undercover officers hustling him into a sports utility vehicle with tinted windows outside the studios of CNN as the 27-year-old man repeatedly screamed for help.
Crooks had failed to appear on Thursday morning at Los Angeles Superior Court, where the grand jury was meeting, after telling a local radio program that he feared for his life.
''All we're doing is arresting him on the basis of a warrant,'' Los Angeles County District Attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said. ''If there had not been a warrant, we would have escorted him to the grand jury.''
''He is a witness and we need him to authenticate the tape recording, otherwise its value in court would be greatly diminished,'' Gibbons said. Crooks shot his videotape from a motel room across the street from the scene of the incident in Inglewood, which abuts south-central Los Angeles.
Crooks called a KFI-AM talk radio show hosted by John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou on Wednesday to discuss the case and said he was afraid that officers would be ''coming after'' him for videotaping the beating of 16-year-old Donovan Jackson.
'I FEAR FOR MY LIFE'
''I fear for my life,'' Crooks said. ''They're going to kick my ass in a cell and take turns on me, probably.''
Deputy District Attorney Kurt Livesay, who was also a guest on the show, then told Crooks over the air that authorities did not want to hurt him, and asked that he give his address to investigators. Instead, Crooks hung up the phone.
The videotape, first broadcast on Sunday, shows Inglewood Police Officer Jeremy Morse picking up Jackson and slamming him face-first onto a patrol car. Several seconds later, Morse is seen slugging Jackson in the face with a closed fist.
The tape sparked cries of racism and comparisons to the incendiary 1991 beating of Rodney King, which was also videotaped. The acquittal of four Los Angeles officers in that case led to the worst urban riots in modern U.S. history.
Several local law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating the altercation between Jackson and Morse, a three-year veteran of the Inglewood Police Department. U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft sent his top civil rights deputy to Los Angeles on the case.
Jackson and his 41-year-old father, Coby Chavis, who was present during the incident, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on Wednesday against the officers involved in their arrest, the city of Inglewood and the County of Los Angeles.
Black leaders, including congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Democrat who represents the area, and Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn have called for Morse to be immediately fired and brought up on state or federal charges.
ATTORNEY: OFFICER DESERVES DUE PROCESS
But Morse's lawyer told Reuters in an interview that the 24-year-old officer had been condemned by public officials before all of the facts were known or the probes even begun.
''I think it's quite unfortunate that people who have sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution would ignore the presumption of innocence and find individuals guilty before there's even been a trial,'' attorney John Barnett said. ''I thought we stopped doing that a couple hundred years ago.''
Barnett, who also represented one of the officers acquitted in King's beating, said public officials were offering inappropriate assurances that his client was guilty.
''This very same thing happened (in the King case),'' he said. ''That's why it was such a big surprise when they were acquitted with tragic, tragic consequences.''
Barnett said that Morse lifted Jackson from the ground and heaved him onto the car because the teen had let his legs go limp in an effort to resist.
''After his hands were cuffed, Jackson was able to reach out and grab my client's testicles,'' he said. ''And on that occasion the punch was seen in order to make that activity cease.''
In Oklahoma, meanwhile, civil rights activists called for immediate disciplinary action against two white police officers who were videotaped beating a prone black suspect with batons.
The officers, Greg Driskill and E.J. Dyer, were to remain on regular duty pending the results of a probe. Oklahoma City police have asked the FBI to investigate.
Reuters 18:47 07-11-02
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10 July, 2002
(BBC)
A US pressure group has filed a lawsuit against Vice-President Dick Cheney, accusing him of defrauding shareholders in a company he used to run. Cheney ran Halliburton oil company for five years
Judicial Watch, based in Washington DC, says Mr Cheney artificially boosted the share price of the Halliburton energy company during the time he was chief executive in the 1990s.
In another development, it has emerged that Mr Cheney took part in a promotional video for the disgraced accounting firm Andersen.
The lawsuit was filed at a court in Dallas, Texas, where Halliburton is based.
It came a day after President George W Bush called for tougher penalties to fight the type of corporate corruption that has engulfed several high-profile companies in recent months.
Investors 'misled'
Judicial Watch alleges that Halliburton overstated profits to the tune of $445m during the period 1999 to 2001, resulting in some investors "suffering huge losses".
Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, said the case should demonstrate that even the richest and most powerful could not flout the law.
"It is very important to hold high public officials accountable under the rule of law, and Vice-President Cheney obviously is the second-most powerful man in the world.
"As we allege in the complaint, he participated in a securities fraud, a stock fraud, and we can hold him accountable.
"We are going to set an example for others that they are held accountable as well."
Mr Cheney was the company's chief executive from 1995 until 2000, when he left to become US vice-president.
Larry Klayman, of Judicial Watch, says profits were overstated
Halliburton announced in May that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - a government watchdog - was investigating its accounting practices over how it reported cost overruns on construction jobs.
The SEC has not filed any charges against the company.
Judicial Watch claims that those accounting methods led to the overvaluation of shares.
Doug Foshee, Halliburton's chief financial officer, said in a statement issued by the company: "The claims in this lawsuit are untrue, unsupported and unfounded.
"We are working diligently with the SEC to resolve its questions regarding the company's accounting procedures."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that he had talked to the vice-president's staff and "they believe the suit is without merit and that is where it stands".
The BBC's Justin Webb, in Washington, says that for Mr Cheney, the case probably amounts to nothing more than an embarrassing irritation.
But the legal challenge highlights a change in the political atmosphere surrounding corporate fraud.
Our correspondent says that, almost as embarrassing for Mr Cheney is a promotional videotape he made praising the now disgraced accounting firm Andersen.
The video, which fell into the hands of the Wall Street Journal, was made in 1996 when Mr Cheney was at Halliburton and showed his personal relationship with Andersen.
In it, he describes how Andersen gave advice "over and above" what would normally be expected from auditors.
In a short section of the video, Mr Cheney says: "I get good advice, if you will, from their people, based upon how we are doing business and how we are operating, over and above the normal, by-the-books auditing arrangement."
Last month, Andersen was convicted of obstructing justice by shredding documents relating to the failed US energy giant Enron.
Mr Bush made a speech in New York's financial district on Tuesday, in which he said he wanted to tighten measures against corporate fraud.
He announced a doubling - to 10 years - of the maximum prison sentence, and the formation of a special investigative task force.
But Judicial Watch said that Mr Bush's rush to crack down on corporate fraud seemed intended to deflect attention away from his and Mr Cheney's own business practices.
Mr Bush has already faced questions about his work as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy Corp a decade ago, when the firm faced an inquiry for masking huge losses.
(NYT)
WASHINGTON, July 12 — The Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the United States efforts to combat terrorism.
From building cells for detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root.
Although the unit has been building projects all over the world for the federal government for decades, the attacks of Sept. 11 have led to significant additional business. KBR is the exclusive logistics supplier for both the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation. The contract recently won from the Army is for 10 years and has no lid on costs, the only logistical arrangement by the Army without an estimated cost.
The government business has been well timed for Halliburton, whose stock price has tumbled almost two-thirds in the last year because of concerns about its asbestos liabilities, sagging profits in its energy business and an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into its accounting practices back when Vice President Dick Cheney ran the company. The government contracts, which the company said Mr. Cheney played no role in helping Halliburton win, either while he led the company or after he left, offer the prospect of a long and steady cash flow that impresses financial analysts.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has appropriated $30 billion in emergency money to support the campaign against terrorism. About half has gone to the Pentagon, much of it to buy weapons, supplies, and services. Although KBR is probably not the largest recipient of all the government contracts related to terror efforts, few companies have longer or deeper ties to the Pentagon. And no company is better positioned to capitalize on this trend.
The value of the contracts to Halliburton is hard to quantify, but the company said government work generated less than 10 percent of its $13 billion in revenue last year.
The government business is "very good, a relatively stable source of cash flow," said Alexandra S. Parker, senior vice president of Moody's Investors Service. "We view it positively."
By hiring an outside company to handle much of its logistics, the Pentagon may wind up spending more taxpayer money than if it did the work itself.
Under the new Army contract, KBR's work in Central Asia, at least for the next year, will cost 10 percent to 20 percent more than if military personnel were used, according to Army contract managers. In Uzbekistan, the Army failed to ascertain, as regulations require, whether its own units, which handled logistics there for the first six months, were available to work when it brought in the contractor, according to Army spokesmen.
The costs for KBR's current work in Central Asia could "dramatically escalate" without proper monitoring, but adequate cost control measures are in place, according to Lt. Col. Clay Cole, who oversees the contract.
The Army contract is a cost-plus arrangement and shrouded in secrecy. The contractor is reimbursed for its allowable costs and gets a bonus based on performance. In the past, KBR has usually received the maximum performance bonus, according to Pentagon officials. Though modest now, the Army contract could produce hundreds of millions of dollars for the company. In the Balkans, for instance, its contract with the Army started at less than $4 million and turned into a multibillion-dollar agreement.
Mr. Cheney played no role, either as vice president or as chief executive at Halliburton, in helping KBR win government contracts, company officials said.
In a written statement, the company said that Mr. Cheney "steadfastly refused" to market KBR's services to the United States government in the five years he served as chief executive. Mr. Cheney concentrated on the company's energy business, company officials said, though he was regularly briefed on the company's Pentagon contracts. Mr. Cheney sold Halliburton stock, worth more than $20 million, before he became vice president. After he took office, he donated his remaining stock options to charity.
Like other military contractors, KBR has numerous former Pentagon officials who know the government contracts system in its management ranks, including a former military aide to Mr. Cheney when he was defense secretary. The senior vice president responsible for KBR's Pentagon contracts is a retired four-star admiral, Joe Lopez, who was Mr. Cheney's military aide at the Pentagon in the early 1990's. Halliburton said Mr. Lopez was hired in 1999 after a suggestion from Mr. Cheney.
"Brown & Root had the upper hand with the Pentagon because they knew the process like the back of their hand," said T. C. McIntosh, a Pentagon criminal investigator who last year examined some of the company's Army contracts in the 1990's. He said he found that a contractor "gets away with what they can get away with."
For example, KBR got the Army to agree to pay about $750,000 for electrical repairs at a base in California that cost only about $125,000, according to Mr. McIntosh, an agent with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.
KBR officials did not dispute the electrical cost figures, which were part of an $18 million contract. But they said government investigators tried to suggest wrongdoing when there was not any.
"The company happened to negotiate a couple of projects we made more money on than others," said one company lawyer, who insisted on anonymity. He added, "On some projects the contractor may make a large or small profit, while on others it may lose money, as KBR sometimes did on this contract."
Mr. McIntosh said he and an assistant United States attorney in Sacramento were inclined to indict the company last year after they developed evidence that a few KBR employees had "lied to the government" in pricing proposals for electrical repair work at Fort Ord. Mr. McIntosh said the Sacramento prosecutor said to him, "Let's go for this, it's a winnable criminal case."
A KBR lawyer said that the government's theory "was novel and unfairly tried to criminalize what was only a preliminary proposal."
The United States attorney's office in Sacramento declined to discuss its internal deliberations in the cast. But it dropped the criminal inquiry and reached a civil settlement in February, in part because of weak contract monitoring by the Army, according to Mr. McIntosh and a lawyer involved in the case.
As part of the settlement, KBR paid $2 million but denied any liability.
Last December the Army's Operations Support Command, unaware of the criminal investigation, found KBR's past contracting experiences to be exemplary as it awarded the company the 10-year logistical support contract, according to a command spokeswoman, Gale Smith.
The Army command's lengthy review of bidders did not discover that KBR was the target of a criminal investigation though it was disclosed in Halliburton's annual report submitted with the bid, according to Ms. Smith. She said that if the support command's managers had known of the criminal inquiry, they would have looked further at the matter but not changed the award.
KBR's ability to earn the Pentagon's trust dates back decades.
"It's standard operating procedure for the Department of Defense to haul in Brown & Root," said Gordon Adams, who helped oversee the military budget for President Bill Clinton.
The company's first military contract was in 1940, to build a Naval air station in Corpus Christi, Tex. In the 1960's, it built bases in Vietnam. By the 1990's, KBR was providing logistical support in Haiti, Somalia and the Balkans.
KBR's military logistics business began to escalate rapidly with its selection for a $3.9 million contract in 1992, Mr. Cheney's last year at the Pentagon. Over the last 10 years, the revenues have totaled $2.5 billion, mostly a result of widening American involvement in the Balkans after 1995.
"We did great things to support the U.S. military overseas — we did better than they could support themselves," said Charles J. Fiala, a former operations officer for KBR. "I was in the Department of Defense for 35 years. We knew what the government was like."
Robert E. Ayers, another former KBR executive who still consults for the company, said Mr. Cheney "stayed fairly well informed" on the Balkans contract.
Stan Solloway, a former top Pentagon procurement official who now heads an association of contractors, said the company "understood the military mind-set" and "did a very good job in the Balkans."
But reports in 1997 and 2000 by the General Accounting Office, the audit arm of Congress, found weak contract monitoring by the Army contributed to cost increases in the Balkan contract that benefited KBR.
The audit agency's 1997 report concluded that the Army allowed KBR to fly in plywood from the United States, at a cost of $85.98 a sheet, because it did not have time to procure it in Europe, where sheets cost $14.06.
Mr. Ayers, the former KBR executive, had worked on the Balkans contract. "If the rules weren't stiff and specific," he said, "the contractor could make money off of overspending by the government."
The contract awarded last December by the Army's Operations Support Command, is "open ended" with "no estimated value," said Ms. Smith, the command's spokeswoman. She said that was mainly "because the various contingencies are beginning to unfold."
KBR won this and most of its other Pentagon contracts in a competition with other contractors, but KBR is the sole source for the many tasks that fall under the umbrella contract.
Pentagon officials said the company had recently taken over a wide range of tasks at Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, from running the dining operation to handling fuel and generating power for the airfield. The company employs Uzbeks, paying them in accordance with "local laws and customs" but operating under United States health and safety guidelines, according to Halliburton's statement.
For the first six months that American troops were at Khanabad, the logistical support was provided by the Army's First Corps Support Command. Mr. Cole, the contract manager for the joint command in Kuwait, said the contract would initially cost 10 to 20 percent more than if the Army had done the work itself. He said that he and his staff recommended using the contractor because "they do a better job of maintaining the infrastructure." In addition, he said, the contractor should provide long-term flexibility, an asset in a war with many unknowns, and cost savings by avoiding Army troop transfers.
Ms. Smith said that the criticisms by the G.A.O. had led the Army to build additional controls into the contract.
At its base in Cuba, the Navy has followed the same pattern as the Army: use the military first and augment it with KBR. The Navy's construction brigade, the Seabees, built the first detention facility for battlefield detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Then the Navy activated a recently awarded $300 million, five-year logistic support contract with KBR to construct more permanent facilities, some 600 units, built mostly by workers from the Philippines and India, at a cost of $23 million.
John Peters, the Navy Facilities Engineering Command spokesman, said the permanent camp was "bigger, more sophisticated than what Seabees do." But the Seabees built the facilities for the troops guarding the detainees, and in the 1990's the Seabees built two tent cities capable of housing 20,000 refugees in Guantánamo Bay.
"Seabees typically can perform the work at about half the cost of contractors, because labor costs are already sunk and paid for," said Daryl Smith, a Seabees spokesman.
Zelma Branch, a KBR spokeswoman, said the company relied on its excellent record rather than personal relationships to win its contracts. But hiring former military officers can help the company understand and anticipate the Pentagon's needs.
"The key to the company's success is good client relations and having somebody who could anticipate what the client's needs are going to be," Mr. Ayers, the former company executive, said.
7-11-2
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using only a genetic map as a guide, U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had built a polio virus from scratch and used it to infect and paralyze lab mice.
It is the closest anyone has yet come to creating life in a test tube -- although scientists deny a virus, which is not a living cell but which can replicate itself, is alive in the same way a bacterium, a plant, or a human being is.
Nonetheless, it has genetic material like all other life.
"If the ability to replicate is one of life's attributes, then poliovirus is a chemical with a life cycle," the researchers at the State University of New York in Stony Brook wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
Eckard Wimmer, who led the study, denies that he has created life.
"No, I would not say I created life in a test tube," Wimmer said in a telephone interview. "We created a chemical in a test tube that, when put into cells, begins to behave a little bit like something alive. Some people say viruses are chemicals and I belong to that group."
Wimmer said once the right genetic parts were in place, the virus virtually self-assembled in a lab dish.
Polio virus does not have DNA like many organisms, but starts out with RNA, which is the working version of DNA. DNA carries the genetic code in cells, and is transcribed into RNA, which controls the production of individual proteins.
To make a virus, Wimmer and colleagues Jeronimo Cello and Aniko Paul had to first take a step backward.
"You cannot synthesize RNA," Wimmer said. "So we converted the sequence from RNA into DNA. And DNA you can synthesize. Then we had to go back to RNA. That was very simple -- by using an enzyme which can read DNA and synthesize RNA, called a transcriptase," he added.
"Now you have the RNA. That RNA we put into a cell-free juice that we developed in 1991 ... and lo and behold out came the virus. It built itself."
The "cell-free juice" is made by taking the virus's favorite home -- a human cell -- shredding it up and removing the big pieces such as the nucleus.
A JUICE FULL OF GOODIES
"The remaining juice that is there contains all the goodies that you need for the process," Wimmer, whose team first sequenced the polio genome in 1991, said.
There were not too many ingredients to throw into the broth. Polio virus has a single, long gene that produces what is called a polyprotein.
But the virus can cut this long protein into smaller pieces that can be used for its few functions.
The virus acted like polio in the test tube and also paralyzed mice genetically engineered to be susceptible to polio -- which in nature prefers to infect human beings. Polio once paralyzed tens of thousands of children a year, before vaccination made it a rare disease.
The process did cause some mutation in the genetic code which seemed to weaken the effects of the virus, Wimmer said.
There are two good vaccines for polio, but Wimmer hopes his team's process might be used to create genetically weakened versions of other viruses for use as vaccines. His team is also working with the hepatitis C virus.
This is a standard vaccine technique -- using a non-dangerous form of a virus to stimulate the immune system without causing disease.
Wimmer raised the specter of bioterrorism, noting that the aim of the current polio vaccination campaign is to wipe the virus off the face of the Earth. Only a few pockets of polio remain, notably in Africa and South Asia.
But Wimmer said if deadly viruses can be made in the lab, they may always be at least a theoretical threat -- which means vaccination may have to continue even when a disease no longer naturally exists.
"It is a wake-up call for everybody to say that what is in the public domain can be used for the betterment of mankind -- namely to combat disease -- and it can be misused. You could argue that it could be misused for bioterrorism," he said.
It is feared something similar has happened with smallpox, which was declared eradicated in 1980 after a global vaccination campaign. But samples of the virus were kept in laboratories and used to make biological weapons, which, many experts fear, remain in the hands of some governments and perhaps of extremist groups.
(www.presidentialufo.com)
7-11-2
Ward Kimball, one of the original Disney animators, referred to by Walt Disney as one of the trusted "Nine Old Men," (supreme court of animation) died in Arcadia California on July 8. He was 88.
Kimball was famous for his creation of the character Jiminy Cricket, The Cheshire Cat, The March Hare, The Mad Hatter, and for redesigning Mickey Mouse in 1938. He joined the Disney Studios in 1934, and rose up in the ranks to become a directing animator on such classics as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia" and "Peter Pan." He directed Disney Oscar-winning shorts "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom" in 1953 and "It's Tough To Be a Bird" in 1969.
Unknown to many Disney watchers, Kimball was also student of UFOs and Outer Space. He had a large collection of UFO books and magazines, according to Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee who met with him in 1980. Maccabee had been to Kimball,s house to recruit him as one of the 10 original board members for the Fund for UFO Research. Kimball accepted the position.
Kimball worked with technical advisor Werhner Von Braun to write and direct three key outer space documentaries for the "Disneyland" television series. The three documentaries were, "Man in Space," "Man and the Moon," and "Mars and Beyond." Kimball referred to them as, "the creative highpoint of my career. According to Disney spokesman Howard E. Green, the three outer space documentaries are "often credited with popularizing the concept of the government's space program during the 1950s.,
The first of these, the 1955 "Man in Space, was so popular (viewed by over 42 million people) that according to Kimball, President Eisenhower phoned Walt Disney from the White House looking for a copy of the production. When Disney asked Eisenhower why he wanted it Eisenhower replied, "Well, I'm going to show it to all those stove-shirt generals who don't believe we're going to be up there!
It was Kimball, who at the July 1979 MUFON UFO symposium in California, told of his interest in the subject of UFOs. Then to a stunned audience he related the story of how the American government had approached Walt Disney himself prior to Sputnik to make a UFO documentary to help acclimatize the American population to the reality of extraterrestrials.
Kimball stated in the speech that around 1955 or 1956 Walt Disney was contacted by the USAF and asked to cooperate on a documentary about UFOs. The USAF offered to supply actual UFO footage, which Disney would be allowed to use in his film.
According to Kimball, Disney went along with the USAF plan, which was not unusual. The use of Walt Disney cartoons, after all had been suggested by the 1953 CIA Robertson UFO panel as part of a public-education program involving the mass media to "strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminatethe aura of mystery it has acquired."
The discussions between the CIA people and Disney may actually have taken place, because in August 1955, Frederick C. Durant 111, who was a member of the Robertson CIA panel showed Walt Kimball's documentary "Man in Space" during the Sixth Congress of the International Astronomical Federation in Copenhagan.
Disney had also cooperated with the government in producing a number of war documentaries during World War 11 like the documentary "Victory through Air Power. In one year, during the war, Disney turned out over four hundred thousand feet of government films.
Disney was also, according to a December 16, 1954 FBI document made a SAC Contact for the FBI, which elevated him from his former position as an informant for the agency. The confidential internal FBI memo read,
"Because of Mr. Disney,s position as the foremost producer of cartoon files in the motion picture industry, and his prominence and wide acquaintanceship in film production matters, it is believed that he can be of valuable assistance to this office . . . "
Once Walt Disney had finished his meetings with the USAF, he began to work on the requested UFO documentary for the public. He asked his animators to think up what an alien would look like. Meanwhile, he waited for the Air Force to deliver the promised film. After some period of time the Air Force re-contacted Disney and told him the film offer had to be withdrawn. There would be no UFO footage as promised. Kimball told researcher Stanton Friedman that once he found out there would be no delivery of UFO film, he personally spoke with an Air Force Colonel who told him, "there indeed was plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Ward, nor anyone else, was going to get access to it. This caused a temporary halt to the project. As one account by Bruce Maccabee described it,
" Disney cancelled the project, but by this time a lot of animated film of creatures, had been completed by his artists.
"So Disney went ahead and made a short "documentary" anyway, featuring Jonathan Winters impersonating various "characters" associated with typical UFO lore.
"I specifically recall Mr. Winters as an old lady/grandmother who saw a UFO and reported it... then he portrayed the Air Force officer who investigated the sightings and offered explanations. He also portrayed a little boy in a room who had a telescope looking up at the stars and, to the little boy's amazement, an alien came through the telescope into his room. Of course the boys father didn't believe that story.
The UFO documentary was never shown in public, but Kimball did show the 15-20 minute piece at the 1979 UFO Symposium. The movie, however, did not contain any of the dramatic UFO footage everyone had been promised. What is important to note about this Kimball story about the attempt by the United States government to "spill the beans is that it was not the only time such an incident occurred.
In 1972-73 Colonel Robert Coleman, former USAF Project Blue Book spokesman, and former ATIC Commander Colonel George Weinbrenner, made an offer of "800 feet of film . . .as well as several thousand feet of additional material of dramatic UFO material to documentary film producers Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler at the Pentagon. They would be allowed to use the UFO footage in a special film project they had been asked to join.
The promised film was reportedly dramatic footage of an encounter between the occupants of a landed UFO and officials at Holloman Air Force Base. It impressed Emenegger who described what he saw in 1988, "What I saw and heard was enough to convince me that the phenomenon of UFOs is real very real.
The project was described to the two producers as a documentary on a secret government project. When the two men discovered that the topic of the secret project would be UFOs, they were surprised because "they had assumed that the matter had been resolved with the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969.
The documentary was to be sponsored by the Department of Defense in a claimed attempt to do a public relations turnaround, which was needed because of the Vietnam War. At least that is the story Emenegger and Sandler were told by Bill Coleman. A number of different subjects were proposed for the documentaries, but no other subject, other than UFOs, were brought up.
The two documentary producers were told that the government was now ready to release all the facts about the alien presence on earth. They were shown evidence that they could use for their tell-all documentary. This evidence included:
- Photographs and films of UFOs. - Pictures of grey-skinned alien beings. - A 16mm movie film of an alien in the company of an Air Force officer. The two men were told that this alien had survived a 1949 crash and it had been kept at a safe house in Los Alamos until its death in 1952. - 800 feet of film showing a landed encounter between three aliens and Holloman Air Base officials during a landing that had reportedly occurred there in May 1971. Several thousand feet of additional material was also offered. - Photos of UFOs taken by astronauts, which NASA had formally denied the existence of.
As the documentary neared completion, the two producers waited for the promised dramatic alien landing footage. Colonel Bill Coleman who had first made the offer to provide it in 1972, however, withdrew it. According to what Emenegger told researcher Tim Good, Coleman had declared, "The timing was politically inappropriate, due to the Watergate scandal.
The Emenegger/Sandler documentary, "UFOS, Past, Present, and Future released by Sandler Films in 1974, was forced to use standard animation, background film taken at Holloman, and "elaborate drawing of the so-called aliens. At least that is what the producers thought when they first ran the film. Later, indications arose that indicated 12 seconds of the actual Holloman landing might have been part of the "training film material they were provided. As an interesting footnote to the Disney story, Emenegger reported that he and Sandler had also talked with the Disney people during the time period they were working on the documentary. The people who they spoke to at the Disney studios "seemed to be involved and interested, but not have any particularly startling data.
In 1983, the United States government made yet another offer of dramatic UFO film for a UFO documentary. The offer was made to documentary film producer Linda Moulton Howe and HBO. They were approached and offered the same Holloman landing film along with a film of the live alien that lived in a Los Alamos safe house from 1949-1952.
While preparing to make a UFO documentary for HBO, Howe was given information by Richard Doty, a special agent with Air Force OSI at Kirtland AFB (Albuquerque). Doty claims that higher ups were willing to release special confirming UFO information for her documentary. Howe described the film offer,
"The government intended to release to me several thousand feet of color and black and white film taken between 1947 and 1964 showing crashed UFO discs and extraterrestrial bodies in historic footage to be included in the HBO documentary supported with official government confirmation."eeeeeeeeee
As with Kimball and the Emenegger/Sandler team, the promised film was never released to Howe. Despite Doty,s claim that the government had authorized the release of film showing crashed saucers and alien bodies for use in the HBO documentary, it never materialized due to "political delays. When the alleged historical film footage didn,t materialized, HBO canceled the documentary.
In 1985, another offer of historic UFO footage was made to Robert Emenegger. Colonel Robert Coleman, now retired from the Air force Public Relations department, indicated the time was again right, and the government might be willing to release key confirming information confirming the extraterrestrial presence on earth. Suggestions are even made that Senator Barry Goldwater, and former President Jimmy Carter "would help obtain the release of the promised film.
One of the conditions tied to the release, however, was that prominent UFO researchers Jacques Vallee and J. Allen Hynek had to get involved in the film project. The reason for this is that a key to getting the information promised by the government is that the film had to be "professional enough and interesting enough to reopen the whole subject before the American people.
Emenegger again believed that the information is about to be released. Vallee, on the other hand, was "negative and skeptical about the offer being made. He felt that if the government wanted to release the information they could simply go to someone like the national Academy of Sciences and announce the discovery of the alien presence.
Both Vallee and Hynek feel the Air Force was again playing games and were trying to use them to deliberately mislead the public. Between themselves they concluded that they could not support Emenegger,s plan, but "if there was any chance of uncovering genuine evidence they would pursue it "behind the scenes. Hynek and Vallee did pursue some interviews at Norton Air Force Base where two Generals assured them they could produce the UFO footage, but the two researchers weren,t buying and the deal was finally withdrawn.
In the late eighties, the government was again busy. This time they floated an offer of an interview with the keeper of the live alien that had been held at Los Alamos. The man had been a Captain in the early fifties when the alien was still alive. He was now a Colonel, near death and prepared to talk. Those presented with the offer were documentary producer Robert Emenegger, documentary producer Linda Howe, and author Bill Moore. This offer like the many before it experienced delay after delay, and a final withdrawal of the offer.
The final twist in this bizarre disclosure saga brings us back to Ward Kimball. A prominent British photographer by the name of Don Maloney reported in 1995, that in 1972 he had been in the United States and was having dinner with the head of the Disney Studios, and four of the nine original Disney animators. Ward Kimball was one of the four at the table.
While this was going on Maloney reported that he was introduced to another man, identified in one account as a "well-known Disney employee. The man offered to show Maloney some unusual film footage at his house. When Maloney saw it he described it as "old footage of UFOs, and "two beings that he was told were aliens. UFO investigator Georgina Bruni interviewed Mike Maloney about his early 1970s encounter at Disney. She described what Maloney told her about the aliens he had been shown on the film:
"One, which appeared to be dead, was laid out on a table - or slab, the other was clearly alive and moving around on the floor. He was given no information as to the source of the footage, which he was told was "top secret", but he was in no doubt that it was a genuine piece of old film. Mike described it as being similar to the alien autopsy footage that had been shown on television. (The Fox "Alien Autopsy film) At no time did he say it was the same, just similar. Of the footage he personally viewed, he said: If the film that I saw was a fake, it was a brilliant fake.,
Was the "well-know employee Kimball, or was there a second "well-known Disney employee who was also a UFO buff? Was the Kimball Disney story told by Kimball in 1979, just a cover for a film that the Disney people had gotten from the government? Maloney has not yet released the name of the man who showed him the film. If it was Kimball who showed the alien film in his house, then the government now knows where that missing UFO film went.
If it wasn,t Kimball who showed Maloney the conclusive E.T. footage, then Ward Kimball, like many UFO researchers before him, had spent many decades of his life gathering strong evidence of the E.T. presence, and died before he could hear the government confirmed his suspicions.
(Ha'aretz Daily)
7-8-2
A proposed law that would allow Jews to bar Arabs from buying homes in their communities could expose Israel to a fresh wave of condemnation recalling the now-rescinded UN resolution equating Zionism and racism, critics of the bill said Wednesday.
In a decision that set off a storm of debate, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet Sunday voted to endorse a bill that would allow areas within Israel which have been designated as state land to be devoted to residential use by Jews alone. The bill still faces considerable legislative hurdles before it can be passed into law.
Although worded in the gray phraseology of legislative practice, the measure goes to the heart of a crucial dichotomy of modern Israel: how to maintain a pluralistic state that is at once formally Jewish in character and genuinely democratic in practice.
"If we are not already totally an apartheid state, we are getting much, much closer to it," said former cabinet minister and leftist Meretz party founder Shulamit Aloni.
"We are also moving farther and farther away from the founding document of the state of Israel," she said, in a reference to the nation's 1948 Declaration of Independence, which pledged "development of the country for the benefit of all its residents" and "complete social and political equality to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender."
The bill was prompted by a landmark Supreme Court ruling over the efforts of the northern Israel Jewish village of Katzir to bar an Israel Arab from buying a house there. Although defined as a "community settlement", without the complex communal interrelationships of kibbutzim and moshavim, Katzir residents voted to keep Israeli Arab Adel Ka'adan from buying a plot and building a house there.
After years of legal wrangling, the court in March, 2000, accepted Ka'adan's argument that the policy of the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body which adminsters state lands for many Jewish villages, discriminated against Arab citizens and was therefore illegal.
Sponsored by National Religious Party MK Haim Druckman, critics said the proposed law was designed to bypass the court decision, formalizing descimination on Israel's lawbooks.
Education Minister Limon Livnat, who spearheaded the cabinet decision to ratify the bill, said the purpose of the measure was to clarify de facto policies in founding specifically Jewish communities within the nation. "This does not stem at all from discrimination, rather from the main basis of Zionism - the return of the Jewish people to its land."
Livnat dismissed suggestions that the bill was anti-democratic, saying that each sector in israel should be allowed to live among its own. Moreover, she said, "All of us were raised on the same Zionist values, according to which, the state of Israel may, from the standpoint of national security - the wider view of security, not necessarily of concrete security ... foster the value of a Galilee with a Jewish majority."
But cabinet minister Dan Meridor, a conspicuous dissenter as the cabinet endorsed the bill by a wide margin, denounced the proposed law as "a grave error" and "flagrantly discriminatory".
"It is not permissible to allow an Israeli law to state that a non-Jew may be prevented from living in a particular place for security reasons," Meridor said. "This is not a security matter at all. There is no need for flagrant discrimination." Indeed, he said, by contrast to discrimination that Jews have experienced in the Diaspora, the Jewish state legally does not discriminate against non-Jews.
"As to the charges that Zionism is racism - what are we ourselves saying here?"
In one of the darkest moments of Israeli diplomacy, the United Nations passed a resolution in 1975 declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Despite strenuous lobbying efforts by Israel, the resolution remained on the books until the Gulf War and the subsequent Madrid Middle East peace conference led the world body to rescind the Zionism is racism measure in December, 1991.
Over the past two years, however, the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, coupled with open warfare betwen the sides, have revived Arab-led denunciations of Israel as a state that practices racism akin to South Africa's long-repealed apartheid regulations that overtly favored whites over blacks and people of mixed race.
Aloni, an attorney, said Israel had already put segregation into effect in a number of ways, among them in appropriating Arab-owned land, designating it as "state land," and earmarking it for use by specifically Jewish towns and villages. She angrily dismissed suggestions that the law was an outgrowth of Israeli-Arab rioting at the outset of the current Palestinian uprising. "If you see this as a life-and-death matter, that means that the state of Israel views its Arab citizens as the enemy."
"Perhaps we should turn every Israeli Arab village into a detention camp, like we do in the occupied territories, so that Druckman and the rest of the messianics could take away their land as well," Aloni said. "By the right of our might, we are acting as a racist nation. South Africa, as well, was white and democratic. But that was not the intention here."
The debate over the law split Ariel Sharon's ruling Likud party, with Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, in the past a relative moderate on such issues, left sitting firmly on the fence. "Legislation such as this has international repercussions that are not good for the state of Israel," said Sheetrit, who abstained in the Sunday cabinet vote.
"I don't think that this must be made into law. I don't believe that you should make a law that specifies that one discriminates against someone from the standpoint of his rights in the state of Israel. On the other hand, I can certainly understand that there are population groups in Israel who wish to live apart, particularly community settlements, like Bedouin, Arab, Jewish, Christian or any other category for that matter."
Asked why he refrained from voting against the proposed law, Sheetrit said, "There is a central question on this point - Is there a conflict between the values of a Jewish state and of a democratic state? If such a conflict does exist, it must be reduced to the minimum.
"We must reach an understanding, but not by means of laws or Supreme Court appeals to force people to accept into their midst people who will spur disputes and trouble within the community ... But if there's no problem, there's no reason not to let them live there, whether Jew, (Muslim) Arab, or Christian."
As the debate over the proposed law intensified, Livnat said she viewed the decision as "a very great victory for those who view Israel as a democratic Jewish state as opposed as those who see it as the nation of all its citizens. There is no racism in this."
Livnat bristled when an interviewer on state-owned Israel Radio went further, drawing a parallel to anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany. "When the Jews came here after the World War Two Nazi Holocaust, perhaps it would not have been expected that Jews would do something like this to Arabs," the interviewer said.
"Any comparison of this type is totally unacceptable," Livnat replied. "Are we exterminating a people? Are we killing people, or forcing them into "Any comparison of this type is totally unacceptable," Livnat replied. "Are concentration camps? How can anyone make such a comparison?"
Jul 12 2002
(The New York Times)
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia Prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a cautious debate is taking place in Saudi Arabia's closed society over intolerance toward non-Muslims and attitudes toward the West that are now viewed by some as inspiring unacceptable violence.
The debate appears to represent a significant shift in a society whose Wahhabi branch of Islam tends to make such questioning taboo.
Mention that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in attacking America were Saudis to almost any room full of people here, and denials still pour forth. There is no concrete evidence, people will argue, adding that even if Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites), a native son, was somehow involved, he was led astray by his rabid Egyptian coterie.
But cracks are beginning to appear in this facade of disavowal. A small group of intellectuals, academics, journalists and religious scholars are quietly suggesting that change is needed.
"We have to confront a lot of things that we thought were normal," said Khaled M. Batarfi, the managing editor of Al Madina, a daily newspaper pushing the limits of what can be published. "We have to examine the opinions that resulted in these bad actions and see if they are wrong, or people just took them out of context."
"Before Sept. 11, it was just an opinion, `I think we should hate the others,' " he said. "After Sept. 11, we found out ourselves that some of those thoughts brought actions that hurt us, that put all Muslims on trial."
Such positions remain controversial. After scores of Saudi religious scholars and academics issued a manifesto this spring suggesting that Muslims might find common ground with the West, they were subjected to withering rebuke by those who accept the Wahhabi notion that Islam thrives on hostility toward infidels.
"You give the false impression that many people condemned the war against America," read one such denunciation on a popular Web site, "But the truth is that many people are happy declaring this war, which gave Muslims a sense of relief."
In another, Sheik Hamad Rais al-Rais, an elderly blind scholar, suggested the manifesto writers showed too much sympathy for the victims of Sept. 11 and debased Islam by neglecting to mention that jihad, or holy war, remains a central tenet.
"You cry for what happened to the Americans in their markets and offices and ministries and the disasters they experienced," he wrote, "and you forget the oppression and injustice and aggression of those Americans against the whole Islamic world."
A number of factors have spurred such debate. Since Sept. 11, the monarchy has eased some suppression of free speech. In addition, a deadly fire at a girl's school in Mecca exposed some of the domestic costs of extremist opinion when trapped students reportedly died because enforcement of modest dress codes kept male rescuers away. In June, the government announced the arrest of a Qaeda cell after months of royal denial that there were any local supporters.
But open discussion of the effects of Wahhabism faces daunting hurdles, not least that hard-line clergy and other scholars with significant influence instantly attack.
The austere teachings of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, who rejected the worship of saints or idols, have been prevalent in Saudi Arabia for more than two centuries. The ruling Saud dynasty owes its very control over the peninsula's once fractious tribes to the fact that their ancestors championed his teachings.
Saudis abhor the term Wahhabism, feeling it sets them apart and contradicts the notion that Islam is a monolithic faith. But Wahhabi-inspired xenophobia dominates religious discussion in a way not found elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Bookshops in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, for example, sell a 1,265-page souvenir tome that is a kind of "greatest hits" of fatwas on modern life. It is strewn with rulings on shunning non-Muslims: don't smile at them, don't wish them well on their holidays, don't address them as "friend."
A fatwa from Sheik Muhammad bin Othaimeen, whose funeral last year attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners, tackles whether good Muslims can live in infidel lands. The faithful who must live abroad should "harbor enmity and hatred for the infidels and refrain from taking them as friends," it reads in part.
Saudis in general, and senior princes in particular, reject the notion that this kind of teaching helps spawns terrorists.
"Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn't mean I want to kill you," a professor of Islamic law in Riyadh explains to a visiting reporter.
Prince Sattam bin Abel Aziz, at 61 one of the youngest brothers of King Fahd and the longtime deputy governor of Riyadh, holds audiences in a soaring office half the size of a football field. The walls are of white stone and the carpeting a sort of modern Bedouin bands of triangles and other geometric shapes executed in pink and blue.
When asked about such fatwas, the courtly prince responds, "You cannot say those people represent Islam," and mentions that he attended a Roman Catholic university in San Diego.
"I am not saying Saudi Arabia has no extremists, but not as many as people think or the press shows to people," he said, eventually bringing the conversation back to Sept. 11. "They say the 15 people who have done this are from Saudi Arabia. But those people were in Afghanistan ( news - web sites), they took their ideas not inside Saudi Arabia, but outside Saudi Arabia."
That is undoubtedly the prevailing view here, despite the widespread perception outside Saudi Arabia that Osama bin Laden tries to justify the violently anti-Western views of his Qaeda organization partly by using Wahhabi teachings.
Some Saudi businessmen, intellectuals and religious figures, however, believe that the clerical establishment does foster intolerance.
A Jidda business executive says of the Saudi clergy: "If you are against them, you are against Islam. If you criticize them, you criticize Islam." Hence no one dares argue directly against the teachings of bin Abd al Wahhab. "He is a larger-than-life figure in Saudi Arabia, like George Washington," said Mushairy al-Zaidy, who writes about religious issues for Al Madina newspaper. "Some scholars in the kingdom try to write that he lived through unique circumstances and since times have changed, practices could be changed in some ways."
The royal family has started to encourage limited discussion. Men jailed during the 1990's for attacking the government on everything from corruption to inviting in American troops have been given license to speak, for example.
Mohsen al-Awaji spent four years in jail and lost his job as a professor of soil sciences in Riyadh. Freed in 1998, his passport was only returned after Sept. 11: This gave him the ability to appear on Al Jazeera satellite broadcasts recorded outside the country.
He broached the topic, radical for Saudi Arabia, that the way other schools of Islam look at issues be more widely discussed. "Wahhabism looks at every situation as black and white, there is no `in between,' no gray area," said Mr. Awaji, who now works as a lawyer. "We have to be more open and more tolerant inside our sects. If we solve that within our sect, then we can be more tolerant than others."
Mr. Awaji was among some 160 scholars and intellectuals who signed a manifesto this spring suggesting more dialogue with the West. But the outcry was such that a few of the signatories withdrew and others issued a clarification suggesting that they were not ignoring crucial concepts like jihad.
The outcry from the more unbending clergy was believed to be particularly fierce because they were already feeling under assault in the fields they dominate, especially education.
The first two private universities have been authorized, and starting next year English will begin in Grade 4. Religious conservatives complained that the emphasis on Arabic needed to read holy texts is being diluted.
But the most controversial change followed the fire at a Mecca girls' school, which was housed, like many, in a converted apartment building of dubious construction. Press reports said 15 girls had died after men from the country's religious vice squads blocked male rescuers from entering and girls from fleeing because they lacked their enveloping cloaks.
The government denied the reports. But during the ensuing outcry it shifted responsibility for women's education from a special presidency supervised by the clergy to the Ministry of Education, which calls it merely an administrative shift.
The kingdom's newspapers, however, announced the change with eight-column banner headlines, "as if Jerusalem itself had been liberated," as one editor put it.
(The Times - London)
7-11-2
The rhythms of the American electoral cycle mean that if President Bush fails to attack Iraq at the beginning of next year, he may have missed his chance.
The Pentagon is unlikely to consider launching thousands of US troops across the desert in the following summer months, when temperatures rarely fall below 100F.
There is an opportunity to strike in the autumn of next year, officials say, but waiting until then risks the fighting spilling over into 2004, leaving President Saddam Husseinís fate unresolved at the start of a presidential election year, something that Republican political strategists are loath to contemplate.
Despite Mr Bushís early rhetoric against Saddam, his room for manoeuvre has always been limited by the calendar. Reports of an invasion being launched this autumn were always likely to be wide of the mark. Americans go to the polls in early November for the critical mid-term elections and Republican strategists do not want their quest to regain control of the Senate wrecked by the unpredictability of war.
Although Mr Bush enjoys the tacit support of many leading Democrats for taking on Saddam, that could change in the ruthlessly partisan atmosphere likely to prevail in 2004. Mistakes and reverses in a war that left thousands of Americans dead could hurt Mr Bush in a presidential campaign, especially if exploited by a canny Democrat who presented criticism as patriotism.
There are early signs that Mr Bush will not enjoy a free political ride. Joe Biden, the Democrat chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he wanted to question administration officials in public this autumn about their proposals for Iraq.
Mr Bush has public opinion with him in targeting Iraq, but there are signs that is weakening. A recent Gallup poll found that support for sending troops into Iraq has fallen from 74 per cent in November to 59 per cent. White House officials want to use support while it is there.
A Fox News poll found that 75 per cent of Americans would support Mr Bush authorising the CIA to use deadly force to overthrow Saddam, a step that he has not taken. Fifty-five per cent think that Washington should try to assassinate Saddam.
Mr Bush set a clock ticking in his State of the Union address in January, when he labelled Iraq as part of an axis of evil, along with Iran and North Korea. Mr Bush said that the trio posed a grave and growing danger. He said that time was not on Americaís side and added: I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.
By the time that Mr Bush stands before Congress next January, he will need to demonstrate that he is living up to his own rhetoric, and acting. Yet the Administration remains deeply divided about what precisely the mission should be, let alone how to accomplish it.
Personality clashes have also frustrated the war planning. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, believes strongly that the mission should be focused entirely on Saddam. The toppling of the Iraqi dictator should mark the successful completion of the operation, he believes.
Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, wants a broader brief, to include the transition to a democratic successor regime, the kind of nation-building that Mr Bush derided in his 2000 presidential election campaign. The success in Afghanistan has emboldened some in the Administration, who say that it shows that intervention will be welcomed if it is swift and decisive. Officials talk increasingly about the search for an Iraqi Karzai, referring to the new President of Afghanistan.
In the past the Presidentís National Security Advisers have thrown their weight around in debates between the Pentagon and State Department. The role assumed by Condoleezza Rice is different. She takes a back seat in debates, acting as a private summariser for the President.
The arrangement pitches Mr Rumsfeld against General Powell, a faultline that is likely to grow as planning intensifies. Mr Bush confirmed this week that he was playing a central role. Iím involved in the military planning, he told a press conference.
However, some diplomats in Washington doubt whether an invasion will happen. One said: I know he wants to do it, but when you look at everything involved, I still dont see how he does it.
(The Register-Guard)
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a country that now seems far away, radio and television broadcasters had an obligation to operate in the public interest. That generally accepted principle was reflected in a rule known as the Fairness Doctrine.
The rule, formally adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949, required all broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to the discussion of controversial matters of public interest. It further required broadcasters to air contrasting points of view regarding those matters. The Fairness Doctrine arose from the idea imbedded in the First Amendment that the wide dissemination of information from diverse and even antagonistic sources is essential to the public welfare and to a healthy democracy.
The FCC is mandated by federal law to grant broadcasting licenses in such a way that the airwaves are used in the "public convenience, interest or necessity." The U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine, expressing the view that the airwaves were a "public trust" and that "fairness" required that the public trust accurately reflect opposing views.
However, by 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was gone - repealed by the FCC, to which President Reagan had appointed the majority of commissioners.
That same year, Congress codified the doctrine in a bill that required the FCC to enforce it. President Reagan vetoed that bill, saying the Fairness Doctrine was "inconsistent with the tradition of independent journalism." Thus, the Fairness Doctrine came to an end both as a concept and a rule.
Talk radio shows how profoundly the FCC's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has affected political discourse. In recent years almost all nationally syndicated political talk radio hosts on commercial stations have openly identified themselves as conservative, Republican, or both: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Michael Reagen, Bob Grant, Ken Hamblin, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, Robert Dornan, Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al. The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing - there is virtually nothing else.
On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the Fairness Doctrine.
Eugene is fairly representative. There are two local commercial political talk and news radio stations: KUGN, owned by Cumulus Broadcasting, the country's second largest radio broadcasting company, and KPNW, owned by Clear Channel Communications, the largest such company.
KUGN's line-up has three highly partisan conservative Republicans - Lars Larson (who is regionally syndicated), Michael Savage and Michael Medved (both of whom are nationally syndicated), covering a nine-hour block each weekday from 1 p.m. until 10 p.m. Each host is unambiguous in his commitment to advancing the interests and policies of the Republican party, and unrelenting in his highly personalized denunciation of Democrats and virtually all Democratic Party policy initiatives. That's 45 hours a week.
For two hours each weekday morning, KUGN has just added nationally syndicated host Bill O'Reilly. Although he occasionally criticizes a Republican for something other than being insufficiently conservative, O'Reilly is clear in his basic conservative viewpoint. His columns are listed on the Townhall.com web site, created by the strongly conservative Heritage Foundation. That's 55 hours of political talk on KUGN each week by conservatives and Republicans. No KUGN air time is programmed for a Democratic or liberal political talk show host.
KPNW carries popular conservative Rush Limbaugh for three hours each weekday, and Michael Reagan, the conservative son of the former president, for two hours, for a total of 25 hours per week.
Thus, between the two stations, there are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative hosts of political talk radio, with not so much as a second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.
For anyone old enough to remember 15 years earlier when the Fairness Doctrine applied, it is a breathtakingly remarkable change - made even more remarkable by the fact that the hosts whose views are given this virtual monopoly of political expression spend a great deal of time talking about "the liberal media."
Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society, where government commissars or party propaganda ministers enforce the acceptable view with threats of violence. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it. Yet the almost complete right wing Republican domination of political talk radio in this country has been accomplished without guns or gulags. Let's see how it happened.
As late as 1974, the FCC was still reporting that "we regard strict adherence to the Fairness Doctrine as the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest - the sine qua non for grant for renewal of license." That view had been ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court, which wrote In glowing terms in 1969 of the people's right to a free exchange of opposing views on the public airwaves:
"But the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount," the court said. "Congress need not stand idly by and permit those with licenses to ignore the problems which beset the people or to exclude from the airwaves anything but their own views of fundamental questions."
Through 1980, the FCC, the majority in Congress and the U. S. Supreme Court all supported the Fairness Doctrine. It was the efforts of an interesting collection of conservative Republicans (with some assistance from liberals such Sen. William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat, and well-respected journalists such as Fred Friendly) that came together to quickly kill it.
The position of the FCC dramatically changed when President Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as chairman in 1981. Fowler was a lawyer who had worked on Reagan's campaign, and who specialized in representing broadcasters. Before his nomination, which was well received by the broadcast industry, Fowler had been a critic of the Fairness Doctrine. As FCC chairman, Fowler made clear his opinion that "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants." He quickly put in motion of series of events leading to two court cases that eased the way for repeal of the Fairness Doctrine six years later.
At almost the same time, Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., who became chairman of the Commerce Committee when Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981, began holding hearings designed to produce "evidence" that the Fairness Doctrine did not function as intended.
Packwood also established the Freedom of Expression Foundation, described by its president, Craig Smith, long associated with Republican causes, as a "foundation which would coordinate the repeal effort using non-public funds, and which could provide lobbyists, editorialists and other opinion leaders with needed arguments and evidence."
Major contributors to the foundation included the major broadcast networks, as well as Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T and TimesMirror.
Packwood and the foundation argued that the Fairness Doctrine chilled or limited speech because broadcasters became reluctant to carry opinion-oriented broadcasts out of fear that many organizations or individuals would demand the opportunity to respond. The argument, which appealed to some liberals such as Proxmire, thus held that the doctrine, in practice, decreased the diversity of opinion expressed on public airwaves.
In 1985, the FCC formally adopted the views advanced by Packwood and the foundation, issuing what was termed a "Fairness Report," which contained a "finding" that the Fairness Doctrine in actuality "inhibited" broadcasters and that it "disserves the interest of the public in obtaining access to diverse viewpoints." Congress, and much of the rest of the country, remained unconvinced.
Shortly thereafter, in a 2-1 decision in 1986, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a new FCC rule refusing to apply the Fairness Doctrine to teletext (the language appearing at the bottom of a television screen). The two-judge majority decided that Congress had not made the Fairness Doctrine a binding statutory obligation despite statutory language supporting that inference. The two judges were well-known conservatives Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, each thereafter nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan. Their ruling became the beginning of the end for the Fairness Doctrine.
The next year, 1987, in the case Meredith Corp. vs. FCC, the FCC set itself up to lose in such a way as to make repeal of the Fairness Doctrine as easy as possible. The opinion of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals took note of the commission's intention to undercut the Fairness Doctrine:
"Here, however, the Commission itself has already largely undermined the legitimacy of its own rule. The FCC has issued a formal report that eviscerates the rationale for its regulations. The agency has deliberately cast grave legal doubt on the fairness doctrine. ..."
The court was essentially compelled to send the case back to the FCC for further proceedings, and the commission used that opportunity to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. Although there have been several congressional attempts to revive the doctrine, Reagan's veto and the stated opposition of his successor, George Bush, were successful in preventing that.
It is difficult to underestimate the consequences of repeal of the Fairness Doctrine on the American political system. In 1994, when Republicans gained majorities in both chambers of Congress, Newt Gingrich, soon to become speaker of the House, described the voting as "the first talk radio election."
Although it is not susceptible to direct proof, it seems clear to me that if in communities throughout the United States Al Gore had been the beneficiary of thousands of hours of supportive talk show commentary and George W. Bush the victim of thousands of hours of relentless personal and policy attack, the vote would have been such that not even the U.S. Supreme Court could have made Bush president.
Broadcasters' choice to present conservative views is not purely about attracting the largest number of listeners. Broadcasters and their national advertisers tend to be wealthy corporations and entities, operated and owned by wealthy individuals. Virtually all national talk show hosts advocate a reduction or elimination of taxes affecting the wealthy. They vigorously argue for a reduction in income taxes, abolition of the estate tax and reduction or elimination of the capital gains tax - positions directly consistent with the financial interests of broadcasters and advertisers.
Imagine a popular liberal host who argued for a more steeply graduated income tax, an increase in the tax rate for the largest estates and an increase in the capital gains tax rate.
Broadcasters and advertisers have no interest in such a host, no matter how large the audience, because of the host's ability to influence the political climate in a way that broadcasters and advertisers ultimately find to be economically unfavorable.
Hence we wind up with a distortion of a true market system in which only conservatives compete for audience share. Whether the theory is that listeners listen to hear views they agree with, or views they disagree with, in a purely market driven arena, broadcasters would currently be scrambling to find liberal or progressive talk show hosts. They are not.
The beneficiaries of the talk show monopoly are not content. Immediately after he became House speaker, Newt Gingrich led the Republican battle to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which, free of some commercial considerations, had broadcast a wider spectrum of opinion. Although not fully successful, that campaign led to a decrease in federal funding for the CPB, a greater reliance on corporate "sponsors" and a drift toward programming acceptable to conservatives.
No reasonable person can claim that the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has led to a wider diversity of views - to a "warming" of speech, as the FCC, the Freedom of Expression Foundation and others had predicted.
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the acts of President Reagan, Reagan's FCC appointments, Sen. Packwood, Justice Scalia and failed Supreme Court nominee Bork and the first President Bush should combine to ultimately produce, in my town, a 4,000 hour to zero yearly advantage for Republican propaganda over the Democratic opposition.Nor should we overlook the Orwellian irony that the efforts of an organization calling itself the Freedom of Expression Foundation helped result in so limited a range of public expression of views.
Perhaps the current president, aware that the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine had the opposite effect of what was publicly predicted by his predecessors and aware that a monopoly on public expression is inconsistent with a democratic tradition, will direct his administration to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. What about that cold day in hell?
7-8-2
We don't have much time. The El Al counter murders in Los Angeles are fast being covered up. Two days ago I presented preliminary evidence suggesting that the "terror" attack, was in fact, a bungled attempt to assassinate Shimon Peres' granddaughter. Peres inhabits a world of murder, and he has at least since he organized the Rabin assassination in 1995. His European circles want Israel to stop existing as a sovereign state and he was to be their blunt instrument of destruction. But Peres has been blackmailed over the Rabin murder and he has been mostly neutralized in Israel. His controllers are most unhappy with what they view as his betrayal of them and sought to exact vengeance against his beloved grandchild. A wild scenario? Let us review the evidence two days later.
11 July, 2002
(BBC News)
The larger cauldron has grown deeper and wider in the last 24 hours
UK scientists have detected signs of unusual geothermal activity beneath two ice caps in Iceland.
They say this has caused the appearance of two deep depressions, known as cauldrons, in one of the caps.
Beneath the other they have recorded seismic movements which could be the precursor of a big eruption.
The scientists say there is little threat at present, but cannot predict how the activity may develop.
The two ice cauldrons, about 12 km (eight miles) apart, are on the Tungaarjokull glacier, on the western edge of the Vatnajokull ice cap in southern Iceland.
One cauldron is 1.5 km wide and 100 metres deep, and the other almost as large. The glacier itself is 200-300 m thick.
One of the scientists involved in the research is Dr Matthew Roberts, of the Icelandic Meteorological Office.
He told BBC News Online: "The larger cauldron has grown deeper and wider in the last 24 hours.
"We think the geothermal activity triggered a rapid release of meltwater from under the glacier."
Volatile ice cap
The team believes this water could eventually burst free of the glacier and this could pose a danger to surrounding areas.
A similar glacier outburst flood, known in Icelandic as a "jokulhlaup", in 1996 washed large quantities of ice and sediment into the Atlantic, causing huge damage to bridges, roads and power lines.
Dr Roberts told BBC News Online he and his colleagues were also concerned about another ice cap, Myrdalsjokull, in south central Iceland.
He said: "We've detected earthquakes there reaching nearly three on the Richter scale.
"The last time there was an eruption there, in 1918, the outflow reached 250,000 tonnes of water per second from the ice cap, and the fallout of the ash cloud spread to the mainland of northern Europe.
"We know that Myrdalsjokull will erupt again, though whether in the next few days or the next decade we can't say."
Waiting to happen
Dr Roberts is working with two colleagues from the UK - Dr Andrew Russell, of Keele University, and Dr Fiona Tweed, of Staffordshire University.
They are part of a project supported by Earthwatch, a conservation charity which undertakes scientific field research.
David Hilliard of Earthwatch told BBC News Online: "It's important for the Icelanders to understand the dynamics of jokulhlaups, because of the potential threat to property and to life.
"Iceland has glaciers and is the world's most volcanic island - a recipe for dramatic events."
Sea level rises 'underestimated'
(BBC News)
17 February, 2002
South Cascade Glacier in Washington State.
(Mark Buchanan in New Statesman)
8th July 2002
It's a small world: take anybody else on earth, and you are probably linked through six acquaintances. What's scary is that a similar rule applies to natural life.
An international team of marine ecologists recently completed an exhaustive historical study of coastal ecosystems, ranging from coral reefs and tropical seagrass beds to river estuaries and continental shelves. Their findings were disturbing. In every case, fish numbers had declined precipitously with the onset of modern methods of industrial fishing. As the researchers concluded: "Everywhere, the magnitude of losses was enormous in terms of biomass and abundance of large animals that are now effectively absent."
The situation has become especially critical in the past few decades. Stocks of Atlantic cod have reached historic lows, while haddock and other species have been declared commercially extinct. Thriving food webs that were stable for millions of years have in the past 20 been radically altered, and almost three-quarters of the world's commercially important marine fish stocks are now fully fished, overexploited or depleted.
This is just one illustration of the trouble facing the global ecosystem. Biologists estimate that the rate of species extinction worldwide is at least a thousand times greater now than it was before human beings walked the earth, and that one-quarter of all species could be obliterated in 50 years.
But does it really matter to us? The political scientist Bj0rn Lomborg, in The Skeptical Environmentalist, has argued that much of what environmentalists have said is overstated - that fears of ecosystem collapse are irrational and largely the result of scare tactics. On a strict cost-benefit analysis, he says, the consequences of species extinction, like those of global warming, are not serious enough to warrant the expense of trying to stop them. We are better off trying to adapt - by seeking other sources of fish to eat, for example. And many others think the extinction of species is of interest and concern only to nature lovers.
Any ecosystem, however, is a staggeringly complex network in which many species interact with one another in delicate and all but unfathomable patterns. Indeed, it is our inability to understand how these living networks hang together - and consequently, how they might fall apart - that has seriously undermined efforts to assess the vulnerability of the global ecosystem.
But in the past few years, researchers have discovered that ecological networks are not unique in their complexity. In their basic architecture and pattern of assembly, ecosystems turn out to be in many ways identical to other complex networks such as the internet, and even to our webs of social acquaintances.
What emerges from this new science is anything but reassuring. The biological world turns out to be a remarkably small one, with the predator-prey links between species arranged in such a way that no species is more than a handful of steps away from any other. More than anyone suspected, the global ecosystem is an intimately connected whole, and we should indeed be very worried about what we are doing to it.
Most of us have run into a friend of a friend far away from home and felt that the world is somehow smaller than we thought. We usually put such encounters down to coincidence even though they happen with disconcerting frequency. Recent scientific work suggests that this "small world" phenomenon is by no means limited to social relations.
In the social setting, the "small world" experience is closely linked to the notion of "six degrees of separation" - the idea that each of us is linked to everyone else on the planet by a chain of no more than six intermediary acquaintances. Amazingly, this seems to be roughly true. In the 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent letters to random people living in Nebraska and Kansas, asking each to forward the letter to a stockbroker friend of his living in Boston. He stipulated that they were to send the letter only to someone they knew personally and whom they thought might be socially "closer" to this man. Even though the US then had a population of around 200 million, most of the letters made it to the stockbroker in just five or six mailings.
Researchers have found similarly small worlds in many other settings. The worldwide web is a network of more than one billion sites connected by hypertext links. Take two sites at random, and it needs only about 19 clicks to get from one to the other. Other studies have come upon a similar architecture in the layout of the world's electrical power grids, in the patterns of neural connections in the mammalian brain, and in the web of chemical reactions within the living cell. The world's ecosystems - or more precisely, the food webs that underlie them - appear to share this "small world" character.
How many species-to-species links does it take to link any two organisms in some chain of cause and effect? In the ecological setting, two species are linked if one feeds upon the other, be it a fox eating a rabbit or a beetle munching an oak leaf. Last year, a Spanish physicist, Ricard Sole, and an ecologist, Jose Montoya, studied Silwood Park, an ecosystem in the UK for which researchers know the fairly complete food web. They found the number of degrees of separation to be only two or three. The tapestry of life is made of a truly dense cloth.
Silwood Park does not represent the global ecosystem; it is certainly more than two steps from a woodpecker in Illinois to a shrimp in the South China Sea. Even so, whales and many species of fish populate the oceans as a whole, and numerous birds migrate between the continents. Bacteria, algae, tiny spiders and other creatures fly round the world in storm systems. These organisms provide links that tie the biological world together. For the global ecosystem, the number of degrees of separation may not be two, but it is probably not much higher than ten.
This discovery is not comforting. It suggests that the extinction of one species will affect not only everything that the species eats, competes with, or is eaten by, but will send out fingers of influence which, in a few steps, will reach most other species in the entire system. It suggests that any belief in our capacity to control the effects of ecological destruction is badly misplaced. That lesson becomes clearer as one delves more closely into the small world phenomenon and into exactly how large networks - such as the human social network - can be so remarkably small.
As first suggested by the American sociologist Mark Granovetter in the 1970s, the answer can be seen by making a distinction between "strong" and "weak" social ties. Strong ties bind us to family members and good friends, or to colleagues at work. These links form the threads of a dense fabric of social structure, and are socially most important to us. But these are not the ties that make for a small world.
Each of us also has "weak" links to people we see rarely, or may never see again. Think of some of your friends from the past - long-lost college mates, say. Or someone you met when travelling. Perhaps you went to Japan and briefly made friends with a fellow tourist from Australia. Your links to this person, or to those friends now out of touch, are weak social links.
What makes them especially important is that they connect you to people who otherwise belong to quite distinct social spheres. Your link to the Australian tourist, for example, establishes a social bridge that connects you in just two steps to every person this man knows. Not only that, but this single link connects each of your local acquaintances, in London, say, to every one of his local acquaintances in Australia. In this way, weak links act like short cuts through the social world.
Mathematics backs up this insight. In 1998, in a paper published in Nature, two mathematicians from Cornell University showed that the effect of weak ties in a social network really does explain six degrees of separation. In a large network - even one of six billion people - just a few weak links running between people from distant places will indeed make for an extremely small world, with every pair of persons linked by a short chain of intermediaries.
The small-world character of the world's ecosystems can be traced to similarly weak links - that is, to links between species that interact only occasionally. Perhaps just one bird in an English wood migrates long distances, and, en route, settles briefly in southern Spain. This is enough to link the organisms of these two food webs together by short chains of cause and effect.
But ecologists are beginning to suspect that weak links within food webs also play an important role in maintaining ecosystem stability. Their argument is subtle, but important, as it could help us to protect the world's food webs from disintegration.
If a predator eats just one other species, it will do so frequently, having no other options. Consequently, the link between these species will be strong. Conversely, if a predator feeds upon 15 different prey, it may eat each species only occasionally. It will then have relatively weak links with these species.
Suppose that, after a climate change or some human intrusion, the numbers of a predator's favourite prey have been severely depleted. What will happen? If this particular predator feeds on only this one prey - if they share a strong link, that is - then the predator must continue to seek that prey even though its numbers are vanishing, driving this species even closer to extinction. When this happens, the population of predators may then fall precipitously as well. As a paper in Nature pointed out a few years ago, this should be a general tendency: the loss of a strong link within a food web will be destabilising, tending to stir up large and dangerous fluctuations in species numbers.
But weaker links can save the day. Consider a predator with 15 different prey. If the numbers of one of these species become very low, for whatever reason, the natural response of the predator is to shift its attention to another species that is more numerous and easier to catch. As a result, the predator would continue to find food, while the prey in danger of extinction could revive its numbers. In this way, weak links between species not only make for a small ecological world but also act as natural pressure valves, playing a central role in guaranteeing the health of an ecosystem.
You might expect that all species would have roughly the same number of links with other species. Not so. Nature doesn't dole the links out equitably. Studies in Silwood Park and elsewhere reveal that a few species always play the role of superconnected hubs: they "own" a high fraction of the links in the food web, far and away more than the average species.
By simple logic, most of these links will be weak links. So these hub species provide the network with an ability to redistribute stress and prevent one species from wiping out another by uncontrolled predation or competition. And that explains why we should be so worried about extinctions.
Half the tropical forests, where two-thirds of all species find their habitat, have now been logged or burned to clear land for human development, with another one million square kilometres disappearing every five to ten years. If healthy ecosystems are small worlds characterised by a few hub species, with a preponderance of weak links providing their stability, then the global depletion of species numbers is truly alarming. As species continue to disappear, the remaining species will necessarily be linked more strongly - if only by simple arithmetic. If some predator preys on only six species where before it preyed upon ten, its links with the six will be stronger, and ecosystem stability can only suffer. As one ecologist, Kevin McCann, argues, the lesson is that, if we wish to preserve an ecosystem, or any species within it, we had best proceed "as if each species is sacred".
What's more, the consequences of removing just one of the "superconnected" species can be dramatic, as a huge number of weak stabilising links would go with it. Ecologists have long talked about "keystone" species, crucial organisms whose removal might bring the web of life tumbling down like a house of cards. A recent study has demonstrated just how crucial their preservation may be.
Suppose you begin removing species from an ecosystem. Slowly but surely, the food web should fall apart. But how? First the good news. Sole and Montoya have used a computer to mimic the loss of species from a food web and have found that real communities stand up relatively well when the species to be removed are selected at random. Now the bad news. Suppose instead that the most highly connected species get knocked out first. In this case, ecological disaster ensues quickly. Removing even 20 per cent of the most highly connected species fragments the web almost entirely, splintering it into many tiny pieces. As the web falls apart, the disintegration triggers numerous secondary extinctions as some species lose all their connections to others and become totally isolated.
The obvious answer is to take special care to preserve the highly connected "hub" species. But it is not easy to predict which species will be the hubs for any particular food web. In the past, ecologists have suspected that the hubs would tend to be large predators, but this does not seem to be true. Sole and Montoya found that they were often inconspicuous organisms in the middle of the food chain, or were sometimes basic plants at the very bottom.
Most species now going extinct are ants, beetles and other kinds of insect. Some take comfort in this, but they are wrong to do so. These species may well be linchpins of the living fabric.
What Sole and Montoya achieved on their computer, human activity is achieving in reality - the methodical dismantling of the world's ecosystems. The leaders of many governments and large corporations find it convenient to suppose that worries about the ecosystem are overstated, and anyway, that it would be demented to carry out reforms that are not politically popular. But we are disassembling the web of life that supports our existence, with little understanding of what we are doing. That is truly demented.
July 10, 2002
(komotv.com)
SEATTLE - Seattle Police apparently have a note explaining the reason smoke bombs were placed in two downtown buildings.
There are now indications the target may be the second largest user of research animals, Huntingdon Life Sciences of England and its U.S. subsidiary.
The actual target, Huntingdon's insurance companies.
The Web site of an animal rights group targets Huntingdon. It suggests a new tactic: Target Marsh Incorporated, a global company providing insurance to Huntingdon.
The targets in Seattle were two Marsh subsidiaries. The Seattle actions seem hardly random. Whoever threw the smoke bombs didn't even have to do research.
The Website lists of every Marsh company in the U.S., including the two in Seattle.
As for what do they hope to accomplish, the Web site brags: targeting insurance companies will make history... and cripple Huntingdon.
Deep in the Web site there are references to two past attacks in Seattle. Both involved stink bombs. One, in November 2001, targeted the Bank of America which loaned money to Huntingdon.
No one claimed responsibility then. Now, it seems, it was the same group has struck again.
But news reports on the campaign against Huntingdon indicate what happened in Seattle is relatively minor. In New York, someone sank a bank president's yacht. Others broke into labs in England, and still others took baseball bats to the company president.
The group leading the drive against Huntingdon says it was not responsible. But a spokesperson noted recently Huntingdon filed for a restraining order. He added it is possible some of the group's "more radical members" may have taken independent action.
July 13, 2002
(nbc4.com)
WASHINGTON -- Police worked into the night collecting evidence at the scene of an explosion that left one man critically injured. The blast occurred in a garage near the Chevy Chase Pavilion, in the 5200 block of Wisconsin Avenue.
The man injured in the explosion is listed in critical condition at Washington Hospital Center. The Washington Post identifed the victim as Wright Sigmund, 21, a student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. The paper reported that he is the son of a prominent Washington businessman who has an office in the building where the explosion took place.
Sigmund was reportedly in intensive care after undergoing six hours of surgery.
Police said he was trying to start his father's car in the underground garage on Jenifer Street when the bomb went off.
Sigmund's mother, Claire Phillips of Dallas, told the Post her son has been living in Washington for the summer and was borrowing his father's car to run an errand. The father, Donald Sigmund, is listed as president and founder of Wolf & Cohen Financial Services, the newspaper said.
The explosion is believed to have been caused by a pipe bomb.
"It definitely has remnants of what we believe was a pipe bomb of some kind," said Charles H. Ramsey, chief of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. "We don't know how it was detonated."
Ramsey said, "We don't know a motive. It does not appear to have any relationship to terrorism." He said evidence recovered made the incident "appear to be more of a personal type of thing."
The blast forced police to close down Wisconsin Avenue, evacuate some residents and halt Metro traffic.
The owner of the garage said police and insurance adjusters will return Saturday afternoon to continue their investigations.
Police reopened the garage Saturday morning, so people who had parked there Friday could retrieve their vehicles. There were reportedly 100 vehicles in the facility that were not affected by the blast.
Evacuations were ordered within a two-block radius, including a shopping mall, offices and numerous restaurants along Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest Washington near the Maryland border. The explosion was about five miles from the White House.
Although things were returning to normal by Saturday morning, the explosion created major inconveniences for many people.
Residents on 42nd Place had to be evacuated and a portion of Wisconsin Avenue was closed for several hours as police diverted traffic and instructed pedestrians.
Metro service was at a standstill and commuters who were parked in the area were unable to get to their cars.
Many area businesses also had to close, but some were able to re-open several hours later.
Previous coverage:
WASHINGTON -- D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey said a vehicle explosion in a parking garage located at 5225 Wisconsin Ave. appears to have been caused by a device which was placed somewhere under the sports utility vehicle. It happened just before 2 p.m. on Friday.
"It definitely has remnants of what we believe was a pipe bomb of some kind," said Ramsey. "So it definitely was an explosive device.
The SUV apparently exploded in the underground garage as a 21-year-old man got in it. He suffered burns over 50 percent of his body as well as extensive wounds on his legs. The unidentified man is listed in serious condition at the Washington Hospital Center.
Ramsey said evidence collected at the scene suggests a personal motive behind the attack. It is not clear whether the victim was the intended target.
"He actually was visiting someone here and had made arrangements to borrow their car," said Ramsey. "He may just have been a person who happened to take the wrong car at the wrong time."
Parking attendants told News4 they heard an explosion and saw a van on fire. They said the man was also on fire. A doctor from a nearby building attempted to help the him.
The D.C. Fire Department said everyone within a two-block radius of the site was evacuated.
Investigators from the D.C. bomb squad, fire and police departments were on the scene, along with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
(Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 8, 2002.)
In a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researchers place immature brain cells into a culture dish and an eerie process unfolds: The cells on their own begin organizing to form the beginnings of a human brain.
For the moment, scientists don't plan to grow brains for transplantation or other sci-fi purposes, but laboratory-constructed brains could provide a tool for understanding the human brain - and how to fix it when something goes wrong.
Already many new insights into how the brain works have been saved onto the hard drive that is modern neuroscience, rewriting the booming field and revealing the brain as the most complex clumps of cells in all of nature.
Removed from the skull, it's an innocuous gray-brown blob - three pounds of wavy gelatinous material.
But no other organ has had such a direct effect on the planet, producing maniacs who engineer mass genocides and thinkers whose theories reveal the nature of the universe.
A century ago, early researchers realized the daunting task that lay ahead for those driven to understand the brain. It also represented the ultimate goal of science.
"As long as the brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery," wrote Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, in 1910.
Nearly 100 years later, neuroscientists still are puzzled by the organ.
But in recent years science has made huge strides in understanding the brain. One powerful new brain imagining technique - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), developed in part by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin - lets neuroscientists peek in on the working brain.
"What fMRI does is allow us to see the brain in action in a healthy state," said Stephen Rao, a professor of neurology at the Medical College.
And one of the biggest discoveries is that new brain cells can be created in adults. This process, called neurogenesis, wasn't thought possible just four years ago.
Creating brain cells
For years, it was believed that neurogenesis did not occur in adult brains. It was thought that all a person's brain cells were created by adulthood. And that while some might die off during aging, adding new brain cells as an adult, it was believed, would somehow disrupt existing brain circuits.
In 1998, scientists at the Salk Institute in California and in Sweden discovered that adults, even those in their 60s and 70s, were capable of creating new neurons. The neurogenesis they discovered took place in the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure involved in learning and memory.
Subsequent studies, both in animals and people, have bolstered the finding. It is believed that neurogenesis is a type of renewal process needed throughout life for the acquisition of new memories and as a way to extend the brain's plasticity, said Fred Gage, a professor of biology at the Salk Institute.
Plasticity refers to the brain's ability to be modified by experience and stimulation and to organize and reorganize its circuitry.
Subsequent animal studies by Salk Institute scientists and others not only confirmed neurogenesis but also found that new neurons in mature brains functioned normally. The cells developed axons and dendrites, the complex branches that extend out from neurons and that transmit and receive the brain's electro-chemical messages.
Stem cells aid renewal
The source of neurogenesis is believed to be neural stem cells, immature brain cells that can become different kinds of brain cells, and that appear to reside in different parts of the brain.
Neural stem cells also have the ability to move across the brain from region to region, especially in response to damage caused by disease and trauma.
Now scientists are trying to figure out how to successfully transplant neural stem cells as well as how to manipulate existing neural stem cells in the body and thereby engineer the process of neurogenesis.
Scientists someday may be able to replace neurons and restore neural circuits that are lost to diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well as stroke and spinal cord injury.
"For some diseases, treatment may be just around the corner," said Arlene Chiu, a scientist with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "For others, it may take 20 years."
Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and Christopher Reeve are examples of how the brain can fail and of a growing awareness among many people that if they don't die of heart disease or can-cer, a brain ailment may await them.
Disorders' damage
While neurological and psychiatric disorders account for only 1.4% of all deaths, they are responsible for 28% of the years people live with disabilities, according to the British Medical Journal, which last month devoted its entire issue to neurodegenerative disease.
The complexity of the brain is the only thing standing in the way of curing those diseases.
A typical brain weighs about 3 pounds, just 2% of the total body weight of a 150-pound person. But the brain uses between 20% and 25% of the body's oxygen and a substantial amount of the calories we consume in the form of the blood sugar glucose.
Those intense metabolic demands are the result of the round-the-clock activity in the brain.
"Without oxygen, the brain is the first organ to go," said Margaret Wong Riley, a professor of cell biology, neurobiology and anatomy at the Medical College of Wisconsin and author of "Neuroscience Secrets."
Brain cells communicate by using positively and negatively charged ions and complex amino acids.
The brain is a mini electrical plant with billions of substations and a grid work that rivals any manufactured network on Earth.
Each brain signal is measured in millivolts. In total, the brain generates about 20 watts of power at any given time.
The typical brain has 100 billion neurons that send electrical signals, each connected to 1,000 or more other neurons.
People often compare the brain to a computer, but in some ways that is an over-simplification.
The brain is smarter, faster and more creative than any computer.
Pathway to knowledge
And instead of a piece of information stored in a specific spot on a computer hard drive, thoughts and memories come into consciousness when electro-chemical pathways between many neurons, often in several different regions of the brain, are activated.
"To have a thought you have to have a family of neurons firing," said Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at NIH. "You need a complex network (of neurons) and usually a series of networks to have a thought."
The brain also is a prolific chemical production facility, making a vast array of substances known as neurotransmitters, complex amino acids that are critical to every thought and feeling we experience.
Each neuron is a separate chemical plant.
Neurons produce many different neurotransmitters that can excite or inhibit electrical activity when taken up by other neurons.
A neuron excited by a particular neurotransmitter will, in turn, release its own neurotransmitter and so on down the line as messages move around the brain.
Brain cells come in all shapes and functions, but they differ from most other cells of the body in at least one major way: They can communicate with each other.
They accomplish that through the use of nerve fibers that extend from the cell body. The fibers are either axons, which send a message, or dendrites, which receive it.
In general, neurons have only one axon but can have many dendrites.
No two neurons are exactly alike.
"These cells are gorgeous to look at," said Mary Ellen Michel, a neuroscientist with the NIH. "There is not a flower on Earth that has the physical beauty of a group of neurons."
Individual axons can extend several feet, such as from the brain down the spine to a muscle in the leg, or just a few microns, such as to a neighboring neuron in the same region of the brain.
The microspace between where an axon and dendrite meet - where electrical energy is turned into chemical energy and then back to electrical - is called the synapse. It is the tiny channel that neurotransmitters must drift across before binding to a dendrite.
In less than one thousandth of a second, a signal can cross a synapse from one neuron to another.
We have trillions of synapses.
Just how those synaptic connections are formed throughout life determine a person's personality and behavior, wrote brain scientist Joseph LeDoux in his new book, "Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are."
We all have the same basic brain structures and a similar number of neurons.
However, how those cells are connected determines who we are.
Connections to personality
There are only two ways to influence the formation of synapses: our genes and our life experiences. Both affect how neurons are wired together.
"The puzzle of how nature and nurture shape who we are is simplified by the realization that synapses are the key to the operations of both," he said. "Whether your paycheck is deposited to your bank automatically or you hand it over to the teller in person, it goes to the same place.
"Nature and nurture function similarly: They are simply two different ways of making deposits in the brain's synaptic ledgers."
From the womb to old age, experiences and our environment account for an estimated 50% or more of our emotional and mental development.
Genes make up the rest.
But exactly how they exert their influence on brain development and how many are involved in the process is not completely known.
So far, scientists have found several thousand genes that play a role in human brain development, said Su-Chun Zhang, an assistant professor of anatomy and neurology in the stem cell program at UW-Madison.
Lab-produced brain structures similar to the ones observed by Zhang may allow scientists to study how those genes work.
Zhang has found that neural stem cells that are cultured in a tray begin to organize into a neural tube structure. The neural tube is the early form of the human brain and spinal cord.
Only the two-dimensional shape of the tray prevents the cells from developing more thoroughly.
Eventually researchers would like to make a three-dimensional structure to allow the cells to develop a more complete brain, he said.
But could something resembling a complete brain actually be grown in the lab?
"We can't rule it out," he said.
Imagine what they could do for the president
10 July 02
(New Scientist)
An armoured car fitted with powerful laser beam designed to blast landmines and cluster bomblets from the battlefield will shortly begin testing at an army proving ground near Waynesville, Missouri.
That would be handy for crowd control.
12 July 02
(NewScientist.com)
Computer enthusiasts have been searching for messages hidden in web site images following new claims that the al-Qaeda terrorist network is using this technique - steganography - to communicate.
However, one expert in the field warns the images that have been flagged up as suspicious after initial examination are almost certain to be cleared after full analysis. Peter Honeyman, at the University of Michigan, told New Scientist: "You get a lot of these. We call them false positives."
On 10 July, USA Today reported that US intelligence officers believe images hosted on a pro-Islamic and anti-American web site called Azzam contain secret messages. There are many free programs available that can be used to lock password-protected information into image files.
The claim prompted computer enthusiasts to scrutinise the images for signs that they have been altered, again using free programs available online. One US computer student has posted preliminary results of his search to the mailing list Politechbot, suggesting that there are many tampered images on the Azzam site.
But Honeyman says to confirm the existence of hidden messages it is necessary to crack the password used to insert the message. This is done by searching through all possible passwords until you find the right one and requires a large amount of computing power.
Niels Provos, who is one of Honeyman's students and has developed a number of steganographic tools says: "Web images are generally of poor-quality leading to a higher false positive rate." He adds that their small size limits their information capacity, making them unattractive for steganography.
The same USA Today report says that US officials also believe al-Qaeda operatives have uploaded 2300 images containing encrypted information to the internet auction site eBay since the start of 2002.
Honeyman and Provos are particularly sceptical about this claim because they conducted an extensive search of eBay in November 2001 and found absolutely no evidence of steganography.
Jul 12, 2002
NEW YORK (AP) - Hackers broke into USA Today's Web site and replaced legitimate news stories with phony articles, lampooning newsmakers and religions but also claiming Israel was under missile attack.
The bogus pages were viewable to USAToday.com readers for about 15 minutes Thursday night before being discovered at 11:05 p.m. EDT and taken offline, said company spokesman Steve Anderson.
The entire site was shut down for three hours to upgrade security, he said, adding that the intruders appeared to have penetrated the Web server computers from outside company firewalls.
All the bogus stories — on seven pages including the site's home page — were falsely identified as having been written by The Associated Press.
The sham missile attack report, linked from the home page, said "unconfirmed reports" from Israel cited "missiles exploding above the city" and speculation Iraq was responsible.
Among the bizarre stories posted was an item about the Pope calling Christianity "a sham." Another was about the shape of the Pentagon being declared unconstitutional because it too closely resembles the Jewish star of David.
An Israeli flag replaced the site's top news photo, along with a phony story on Israel.
The other fake stories were obvious hoaxes. One claimed President Bush had named a propaganda minister, another quoted the Vatican as claiming the Bible was an "April Fool's joke."
"The pages were very prankish and immature," said Anderson. "They were very poorly written, obviously phony news reports."
There was no overt claim of responsibility, but at the end of one fake story the intruder indicated he or she planned to attend the H2K2 hacker convention in New York City that runs through Sunday.
USA Today said it reported the incident to police in Fairfax County, Va., where the company's offices are located. An FBI ( news - web sites) spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., Deborah Weierman, said the bureau was "assessing the situation."
While USAToday.com's defacement appears to have been a prank, security experts say subtle manipulation of online news reports has the potential to create havoc.
"What we're scared about is not defacing the page so it's obvious, but putting in small changes that are hard to notice," said Chris Wysopal of (at)stake, a computer security consulting group in Cambridge, Mass.
Information warfare experts say a carefully managed disinformation campaign could trigger economic or public panic, as well as undermine trust in all Internet news sources.
USAToday.com is one of the Internet's most frequented news sites, with nine million monthly visits, Anderson said.
Media-owned Web sites with heavily trafficked news pages are prime targets for publicity-seeking hackers, security experts say.
In previous incidents, hackers have penetrated sites owned by The New York Times and Yahoo!, in the Yahoo case altering content.
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