Creepy Disclosures Weblog

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Creepy Disclosures Weblog- archive#44

  • Fifth Intense Solar X-Flare - What's Happening On the Sun?
    Linda Moulton Howe
    earthfiles.com
    At 20:48 UT on October 29, 2003, the fifth intense solar X-Flare (near sun's center)
    in a week erupted on the sun, emitting light, x-rays, ultraviolet rays and
    plasma energies which will impact Earth yet again on October 30.
    Image courtesy Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

    October 29, 2003 Grenbelt, Maryland - Today at 20:48 UT (4:58 p.m. ET), the fifth intense solar X-Flare (10) in a week erupted on the sun. The massive Jupiter-sized sunspot known as 486 has been the source of two of the most powerful solar flares ever recorded in the X category that indicates most intense sunspot eruptions. The unprecedented series of five X-flares within a week began last Thursday, October 23, 2003, when there was a powerful X-sized solar flare, followed by two weaker X-flares. Then on Tuesday, October 28th, came the third largest solar flare ever recorded - an X 17.2. The strongest known is an X 20. That was followed on Wednesday, October 29th, with an X 10.
    The five X-class solar flares have caused x-rays, ultraviolet rays and plasma energies to impact the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere causing interference with radio and satellite transmissions, the re-routing of some airline flights and provoking beautiful Northern Lights as far south as Florida.
    Sunspot 486 and another large one, 488, still pose a threat of more strong X-class solar flares which could continue to interfere with Earth cell phones, pagers, electric grids, and satellites.
    Paul Brekke, Ph.D., Solar Physicist with the European Space Agency in the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland told me today, "This is very unusual. The sun is very active right now and the fact that the same region of the sun explodes with X-sized flares two days in a row is not very common. What happened? We don't really know. The sun is very unpredictable and just two weeks ago, we thought the sun was unusually quiet. There were no sunspots on the surface and we thought this would be a very long and kind of dull decay down from solar maximum. But suddenly, the sun changed its mind and this is the result."

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Interview:
    Paal Brekke, Ph.D., Solar Physicist, European Space Agency, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland: "Just about two hours ago (at 4:58 p.m. ET), another very powerful flare erupted from the sun. And this is also a very strong flare compared to normal flares. It's classified as X-9.8, which is still among some of the twenty strongest flares ever recorded in the last 25 years.
    YESTERDAY'S WAS A 17.2?
    Yes, the one yesterday was much more powerful, but the one today is also very powerful compared to normal flares. When a flare goes up like this, it is a very intense flash of x-rays and UV light. That light will move at the speed of light and reach the Earth in eight minutes and slam into the atmosphere. It doesn't reach the ground because these energies are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, but it will heat up the atmosphere and make it turbulent so that many radio communication systems will not be able to reflect from the ionosphere or go through it. So, they usually call this a 'radio black out' when radio communications are falling out due to this intense flare that happened.
    HAS THERE EVER BEEN A TIME PREVIOUSLY RECORDED IN WHICH THERE HAVE BEEN FIVE SUCH LARGE SOLAR FLARES IN JUST A MATTER OF A FEW DAYS?
    I don't think so big, no. The first one was not that extraordinary. It was an X-5 and X-1. But then you have X-10 and X-17.2 and the next one X-9.8 ­ that's very unusual, I think.
    We don't know really why the sun acts like this. Sometimes it has a very quiet period and then suddenly activity runs up again. If you're looking at the top of the solar cycle and sunspots, you will see it's not a very smooth curve. It's jumping up and down and very active for a few weeks. Then it can drop down and be very inactive for another couple of weeks. It goes up and down, but still this period must be regarded as quite special ­ these big flares. Also, by luck, they were centered on the central portion of the sun, so the storms are headed toward us. That is not always the case. We can still see big flares, but if they are on the limb (edge) of the sun, we can see the flash, but we don't receive the storm because the CME cloud will go off on the side.
    DO YOU KNOW SINCE YESTERDAY AFTER THE 17.2 X FLARE, DO YOU KNOW WHAT CONSEQUENCES THERE HAVE BEEN ON EARTH TODAY?
    From the flare today, I don't know. The flare yesterday had an immediate effect lasting for a few hours. It's the cloud of gas that is coming off the flare that has affect for several days. Right now, the flare is ongoing as we are talking, there is severe radio blackouts on the sunlit side of the Earth, the one facing the sun. That's where the rays are hitting right now. So, that's the immediate effect: on radio communications, some satellite telephone will have problems working because they have to go through this region (ionosphere) and also Global Positioning Systems (GPS) can be interfered with during these solar flare storms.
    One group that is using those radio frequencies are the commercial airlines and those blackouts are usually more severe closer to the poles, the North and South poles. They try to avoid those regions when there is a blackout because they don't want to lose contact with aircraft from the tower. They usually reroute their airplanes to go further south, which mean a longer flight and more delays. That's one thing I know happened the last couple of days - air traffic control rerouting planes.
    I also heard today that aircraft flying to the South pole for the station down there also had problems with their radio communications.
    WHAT EXACTLY IS THE MATERIAL THAT MOVES FROM THE SUN TO EARTH IN EIGHT MINUTES FROM A SOLAR FLARE?
    The flare is just light, like any other light, but moves very fast. It takes only eight minutes from the sun to Earth.
    Then there is also a second wave of particles which is called 'high energy protons.' That takes about an hour or less from the sun to the Earth. The high energy protons move almost at the speed of light and they can kill satellites and be harmful to astronauts in space.
    The third wave that usually comes is called a 'Coronal Mass Ejection' (CME). It's a big blob of gas that is pushed out from the sun at high speed and takes about one to three days to reach Earth, depending upon the speed. That is the big cloud that contains protons, electrons, particles and negatively or positively charged ion plasma, plus the magnetic field. The CME is the one that slams into our magnetosphere a couple of days later after the flare on the sun.
    SINCE THIS IS UNUSUAL AND PERHAPS UNPRECEDENTED TO DATE, COULD IT MEAN THERE IS SOMETHING ON THE SUN THAT IS CHANGING?
    The sun has always been changing. That's a very interesting topic. We know the sun is more active today than it was like 150 years ago. In fact, there was a period further back in time around 1650 when the sun did not have sunspots for 70 years. People looking into this since the sun is the ultimate driver for our heat and climate, people think the sun might drive the climate's variations. So, this period back about 400 years ago, corresponded to a very cold time period on the Earth called the Little Ice Age. So people have tried to understand how much of the recent global warming, for instance, is due to the sun which is more active now, sends out more energy and particles. This is a very interesting topic to understand: how much of the warming is caused by the sun and how much by atmospheric gases?
    WHAT DO YOU THINK?
    I personally think that the sun is more important than the general climate society will admit it is. Right now, I think it is a consensus within the climate research society that the sun can explain quite a lot of the warming up in 1940 when the temperature had decreased for 30 years and then is increasing for 30 years. The sun can only explain about 20% of the warming the last few years, but I think the sun can be more important that currently used in climate models.
    IF WE WERE GOING TO SEE A PATTERN OF AN INCREASING NUMBER OF THESE LARGE X-FLARES, WOULD WE SEE ANY INCREMENTAL INCREASE IN THE TEMPERATURE ON OUR PLANET?
    No, these flares only send out UV and X-rays and they will be absorbed in the atmosphere. It also lasts for only a few hours. If you want to change the temperature on the Earth, you have to have a change in the sun's activity over many years. So, even an 11 year cycle, we can see there is a signal in the surface temperature in the solar 11-year-cycle, so the sun has some effect. But it has to be shining bright for many years, maybe 20 or 30 years before the Earth responds with temperature increase.
    SO, THE BIGGEST IMPACT OF HAVING THIS UNUSUAL SERIES OF LARGE X-FLARES IS THE INTERRUPTION WITH OUR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS?
    Yes, that is a serious one because a lot of people depend on this. We mentioned aircraft and control towers. You can imagine you want to go out and rescue people in a snowstorm up in the mountains. You have to send out the rescue team and they will depend on their walkie talkies. Those systems can fail, it can be dangerous to send out people into the mountains to rescue that person sitting there. Many types of things that we have to be aware of and society needs to be aware that if you depend on a system very much, you need to know about these solar flare storms and maybe pay attention to the forecasts and maybe have a backup system for storms.
    No, it has happened before in some of the active regions. Very often we see that the sunspots lump themselves on the same side of the sun. Then they rotate around to the backside. And then we see no sunspots until some come back the next month. It takes 27 days for the sun to rotate around its own axis one time. So sometimes sunspots can live for several orbits around the sun. It's not often you have two such powerful flares so close together (October 28 and 29).
    DO YOU AND OTHER SOLAR PHYSICISTS HAVE HYPOTHESES ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE SUN TO CREATE THESE GIGANTIC FLARES?
    We think we know a little bit about that, especially after SOHO was launched and we can see inside the sun and we can now see beneath the surface of the sunspots. What we think it is: the inner portion of the sun rotates a bit different from the outer layer and this boundary layer where this difference happens, there will be very strong 'friction,' you might say. That is what we think is causing the sun's magnetic field to form. Sometimes these magnetic fields can raise up to the surface and that's what is creating sunspots when some of these strong magnetic fields or areas come up to the surface. They will block some of the energies trying to escape from beneath, but have to come out other places on the sun. That's why sunspots look darker. There is less energy coming out of them and they are a little bit colder.
    That's why we think the internal magnetic fields are popping out and after awhile the surface field will become unstable and snap. And we think again you can look at this as rubber bands, two pieces of a rubber band that connect on two places on the sun. You wind them up and if you wind a rubberband up enough, it will snap. And when a rubberband snaps, it goes in one direction and usually with a sound snap, too. So, the snap can be the flare that the energy is released very suddenly and the rest of the energy is going to throw this rubberband away.
    IN LOOKING BACK OVER OUR SOLAR RECORDS HAVING TO DO WITH THE 11-YEAR SUNSPOT CYCLE, IS THERE ANY PRECEDENT FOR THERE BEING THIS KIND OF INTENSE SOLAR FLARE ACTIVITY IN BETWEEN SUNSPOT CYCLES?
    A sunspot cycle on the 11 year cycle has been measured only with the number of sunspots. You can have fairly good solar storms even if there are a few sunspots on the sun. If you go back in the literature and look at the previous solar cycles, very often some of the biggest flares have happened actually on the decay phase of the solar cycle. We are now in a decaying phase. We reached maximum solar cycle in 2000. But increases can happen any time. We can never be for sure. But most of the flares happen during solar max or just after.
    IF THESE WERE COMING DAY BY DAY FOR A PERIOD OF TIME, WOULD THEIR IMPACT INCREASE ON THE EARTH BECAUSE SO MANY WERE COMING? OR DOES IT DISSIPATE QUICKLY?
    I think it dissipates very quickly, but if the storm that came yesterday and hit us today ­ if the storm continues for two days like they sometimes do, the next storm from today will maybe arrive early tomorrow and then they might add up. If you had three or four of these flares in four days, then it will increase impact on the Earth. But the sun has existed for many thousands of years and there have been many flares back in history. I don't think that is a worry.
    YOU ARE NOT PERSONALLY CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT THIS INTENSE X-FLARE ACTIVITY MIGHT MEAN?
    No, the Earth system will accommodate this easily. It's done it before. It will just be a lot of activity in the system right now and in a few days, we will be back to normal. Unless there is another flare. But in four or five days, all this activity will be out of sight from us and it will probably be at least 14 days with a quiet and peaceful time."

  • The Great Solar Storm Of 1859 Revealed
    SPACE.com
    10-29-3
    A pair of strong solar storms that hit Earth late last week were squalls compared to the torrent of electrons that rained down in the "perfect space storm" of 1859. And sooner or later, experts warn, the Sun will again conspire again send earthlings a truly destructive bout of space weather.
    If it happens anytime soon, we won't know exactly what to expect until it's over, and by then some modern communication systems could be like beachfront houses after a hurricane.
    In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii.
    The event 144 years ago was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory, one that cut power to an entire Canadian province in 1989. A new account of the 1859 event, from research led by Bruce Tsurutani of NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, details the most powerful onslaught of solar energy in recorded history.
    Solar Conspiracy
    Space storms are created when the Sun erupts, sending charged particles racing outward, an expanding bubble of hot gas called plasma.
    In 1859, four crucial events conspired at one moment, Tsurutani told SPACE.com.
    "The plasma blob that was ejected from the Sun hit the Earth," he said. That's a relatively routine event. What preceded the strike was more unusual. "The blob came at exceptionally high speeds. It took only 17 hours and 40 minutes to go from the Sun to Earth." Solar storms typically take two to four days to traverse the 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
    "The magnetic fields in the blob, called a coronal mass ejection, were exceptionally intense," Tsurutani said. "And the fourth, most important, ingredient was that the magnetic fields of the blob were opposite in direction from the Earth's fields."
    Earth's magnetic field normally protects the surface of the planet from a continual flow of charged particles, called the solar wind, and even does a pretty good job defending against some storms. When a storm swept past Earth last Friday, it met up with magnetic field pointed in such a way that it thwarted the storm's effects. That's not always the case.
    In 1859, the planet's defenses were overwhelmed.
    That Was Then
    Society back then did not notice the storm the way it would today. The telegraph was 15 years old. There were no satellite TV feeds, no automated teller machines relying on orbiting relay stations, and no power grids.
    Tsurutani said scientists can't yet accurately measure or predict what the strength or direction of Earth's magnetic field will be when a storm arrives. The storms themselves can be predicted. And Tsurutani says there will eventually be another one like 1859.
    "It could very well be even more intense than what transpired in 1859," he says. "As for when, we simply do not know."
    Bernhard Fleck, the European Space Agency's project scientist for the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft, says the next super space storm will be detectable, but that's only half the story.
    "A monster event of the magnitude described [by Tsurutani] we would easily recognize as something extraordinary with SOHO and other solar instruments," Fleck said in an e-mail interview. But, he added, "We certainly wouldn't know its full extent until arrival."
    During the 1859 flare-up, solar observers logged almost an entire minute during which the amount of sunlight doubled at the region of the flare.
    "Such a strong white-light flare has never been seen since," says Paal Brekke, SOHO deputy project scientist. "So if this type of flare happened, yes we would know right away." But he adds that the orientation of Earth's magnetic field would not be known. Future space-based observatories could address this blind spot in space weather forecasting.
    Meanwhile, the blind spot became clear on Friday.
    Forecasters at NOAA's Space Environment Center, relying on SOHO pictures and data, warned of an impending set of storms that could disrupt communications and might set off colorful aurora Friday and Saturday. The forecast, along with two Jupiter-sized sunspots at the roots of the storms, gained widespread media attention.
    But the first and larger of the storms passed by with far less effect than one might have been led to expect. In fact, they were both comparative drops in the space weather bucket.
    Extreme Measures
    To get an idea of the strength of the 1859 storm, you have to wade into nT's for a moment.
    A space storm's impact is measured in nano-Teslas (nT), Brekke explained. The lower the figure, the more powerful the storm. A moderate storm can be around -100 nT; extreme and damaging storms have been logged at around -300 nT.
    The 1989 coronal mass ejection that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada measured -589 nT, Brekke said. The 1859 perfect storm was estimated to have been -1,760 nT. Brekke used three exclamation points in his e-mail delivering that number.
    People on the ground are generally safe even in the worst space weather. But technology could be in trouble when the next super storm hits.
    "In 1859, the technology was quite low in comparison to today's technology," Tsurutani said. "However the technology that we rely on today is much more vulnerable."
    A strong storm does its damage in part by inducing currents on power and communication lines, leading to potential overloads. Obviously, there are a lot more wires on Earth today, "so one might expect much worse problems if it occurred today."
    The charged particles can also zap satellites, as has occurred with handful of storms in recent years -- events with far fewer charged particles than in 1859. A space storm also heats the upper level of Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand. That's no good for satellites that can get caught up in air that didn't used to be there.
    "This can lead to enhanced satellite drag and possible loss of these to the atmosphere," Tsurutani said.
    Tsurutani and his colleagues -- Walter Gonzalez of the Brazilian National Space Institute and Gurbax Lakhina and Sobhana Alex of the India Institute of Geomagnetism -- reviewed known observations of the 1859 event's solar and aurora output, plus accounts from the ground. They also used recently rediscovered historic data on Earth's magnetic field from the Colaba Observatory in India.
    The findings were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

  • Second Solar Storm Hits Earth
    Reuters
    Thursday, October 30, 2003; 5:36 PM
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A second huge magnetic solar storm hit Earth on Thursday, just a day after an earlier one hurtled into the planet in what one astronomer called an unprecedented one-two punch.
     "It's like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the sun ... and it's taken two big shots at us," said John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
    Kohl, the lead investigator for an instrument aboard NASA's sun-watching SOHO spacecraft, said the probability of two huge flares aimed directly at Earth coming so close together, as they have this week, was "unprecedented ... so low that it is a statistical anomaly."
    While such solar storms do not directly endanger humans, the charged particles can play havoc with electric grids, satellites and other equipment. They can also create spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights.
    To brace for any possible energy surges, power plants from Sweden to New Jersey cut production to limit how much electricity was flowing over transmission grids. A Japanese communications satellite temporarily stopped operations earlier in the week.
    Kohl said the second solar storm, known as a coronal mass ejection, peeled off the sun around 4 p.m. EST Wednesday. Charged particles from the ejection started arriving at Earth around 10 a.m. EST Thursday.
    This was just a day after an earlier ejection was first detected on Earth, arriving around 1 a.m. EST Wednesday.
    MOVING FASTER
    The second blast from the sun was moving even faster than the first one did, and some particles from the first linger even as the second onslaught continues, Kohl said in a telephone interview.
    Kohl said the first storm traveled at a top speed of 4.9 million miles per hour, while the one that hit on Thursday moved at 5.2 million miles an hour.
    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs the U.S. early warning center for such solar events, said that Wednesday's storm prompted a report that northern lights had been seen as far south as El Paso, Texas.
    The X-ray and solar radiation storms rank as the second largest such events recorded in the latest 11-year cycle, according to NOAA data. Records of solar cycles date from 1755. This is the tail end of the 23rd cycle.
    Wednesday's geomagnetic particle storm measured G5, or extreme, making it one of the three or four strongest such storms in the latest 11-year cycle. By contrast, Kohl said the storm that hit on Thursday was a K8, still substantial but not as intense as the previous one.
    An astronomer at the University of Iowa even managed to detect the sounds made by the first storm: a clicking noise that resembled an old-fashioned telegraph, followed by a whoosh that sounded like a jet engine.
    Don Gurnett, a space physicist at the university, said in a statement these sounds of the solar flare were picked up on Tuesday by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it headed for a rendezvous with Saturn and its moons.

  • Solar gas cloud racing to Earth. Storm may disrupt power and satellites
    October 23, 2003
    By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
    One of the biggest sunspots in a decade has ejected a massive cloud of charged gas that could disrupt electrical power grids and satellite communications when it reaches Earth on Friday, Boulder researchers said.
    A sunspot cluster 10 times larger than Earth released a chunk of the sun's outer atmosphere early Wednesday morning, said Larry Combs, a forecaster at the federal Space Environment Center in Boulder.
    The so-called "coronal mass ejection" contains more than a billion tons of matter and is streaking toward Earth at nearly 1 million mph, Combs said.
    It is expected to slam into Earth's magnetic field Friday, generating a strong geomagnetic storm that could spark a shimmering auroral display as far south as Oregon.
    A major solar flare exploded from the same sunspot cluster, known as Region 484, on Sunday. X-rays from the flare knocked out high-frequency radio communications over the continental U.S. for more than two hours, Combs said. Such communications are used by airliners and ships.
    The sun reached the peak of its 11-year activity cycle in 2000. The number of sunspots and surface eruptions has been declining since then.
    "It's somewhat unusual to have this much activity when we're approximately 3 ½ years past solar maximum," Combs said Wednesday.
    Sunspots are dark, relatively cool regions of the sun's surface. They occur when strong, distorted magnetic fields trap heat beneath the sun's surface, keeping the spots slightly cooler than their surroundings.
    Region 484 is the fourth-largest sunspot cluster in the current 11- year solar cycle, Combs said.
    A solar flare is an explosive release of energy that can last minutes or hours. The equivalent of 40 billion Hiroshima-size atomic bombs can be released.
    The Space Environment Center is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earlier this month, Congress threatened to close the center, which provides around-the-clock warnings of solar activity.
    No final decision has been made about the center's fate.

  • Sun in frenzy since 1940, Germans say
    Wed Oct 29 2003 10:05:09 ET
    German scientists who have created a 1,000-year-record of sunspots said Wednesday they discovered the Sun has been in a frenzy since 1940 and this may be a factor in global warming.
    The research, based on the quantities of the isotope beryllium 10 found in ice bores from Greenland and the Antarctic, challenges the belief that carbon dioxide from cars and coal fires and other greenhouse gases are the only cause of recent warmer climates.
    The team from the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Germany and Finland's Oulu University discovered a past phase of elevated sunspot activity between 1100 and 1250, though there were far fewer sunspots then than today.
    The earth was very warm at that time and Vikings were recorded as farming on Greenland.
    A gas cloud from one of the largest flares ever seen on the Sun reached the Earth this week causing a magnetic storm that disrupted radio and radar systems, forcing safety authorities to space out airline traffic. More flares and disruption are expected.
    The findings, which are to appear in the December issue of Physical Review Letters, chart sunspots back to the year 850. Sunspots were first observed in the early 17th century after the discovery of the telescope.
    Astronomers have made on-again-off-again notes ever since of the spots, where the Sun's surface appears darker because magnetic fields disrupt the outflow of energy from the star's interior. Most of the surface is 5,800 degrees celsius, but a spot is 1,500 degrees colder.
    The 11-year cycle of sunspots from strong to weak to strong again is well known to anyone using shortwave radio, but the long-term fluctation was not plain.
    The team said the surge of spots and gas flares since 1940 was the greatest in the entire period checked. The activity was 2.5 times the long-term average. Solar activity matched average temperatures on the Earth, they added.
    Radioactive beryllium 10 used for the readings comes from cosmic rays bombarding nitrogen and oxygen in the air. The element falls to the ground with rain and snow. Layers are preserved in the ice caps.
    Sunspots block cosmic rays from reaching the Earth, meaning less beryllium and increased ultraviolet radiation.
    The statement Wednesday noted a much-discussed Danish hypothesis suggesting cosmic radiation helps tiny particles to form in air, increasing cloud formation. Sunspots would thus mean fewer clouds.
    Sami K. Solanki, director of the German institute, said the team had discovered a new climate influence, but still believed recent climate change was mainly the result of mankind using more and more fossil fuels.
    ``Even after our findings, I would say the sharp increase in global temperatures since 1980 can still be mainly attributed to the greenhouse effect arising from carbon dioxide,'' professor Solanki said.

  • Jesus actor struck by lightning
    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3209223.stm
    2003/10/23
    Actor Jim Caviezel has been struck by lightning while playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion Of Christ.
    The lightning bolt hit Caviezel and the film's assistant director Jan Michelini while they were filming in a remote location a few hours from Rome.
    It was the second time Michelini had been hit by lightning during the shoot.
    Neither of them was badly hurt, according to the film's producer Steve McEveety.
    Michelini had previously been struck during filming in Matera, Italy, when he suffered light burns to his fingers after lightning hit his umbrella.
    Describing the second lightning strike, McEveety told VLife, a supplement of the trade paper Variety: "I'm about a hundred feet away from them when I glance over and see smoke coming out of Caviezel's ears."
    The Passion Of Christ, which was filmed in the ancient languages of Latin and Aramaic, is directed and co-written by actor Mel Gibson and focuses on the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus.
    Although it is not due for release until early next year, it has already hit headlines after Jewish figures in the United States slated it for being "dangerous" and portraying Jews in a negative way.
    Originally titled The Passion, the film changed its title last week after Miramax claimed the rights to the title for one of its own projects, a historical epic based on a Jeanette Winterson novel.
    The film now looks set to be released in the States by independent distributors Newmarket Films, who released Memento and Whale Rider in the US.

  • Astronaut Sees Mystery Lights -Ed Lu doesn't know what the flashes were
    Dateline: Friday, October 31, 2003
    Source: Guardian
    Astronaut Ed Lu, recently returned from a six-month tour as science officer on the International Space Station (ISS), is puzzled. Lu's questions arise from mysterious flashes of light he witnessed while studying the Earth's aurora.
    On three occasions while observing the aurora - July 11, September 24 and October 12 - Lu saw bright flashes on the magnitude of the brightest stars. He dismissed thoughts that they were 'retinal flashes' which are often experienced by astronauts when heavy cosmic rays hit their eyeballs.
    Lu has ruled out other explanations - such as meteors, satellites, or reflections from dust particles - and as such can only assume at this time that he witnessed a new anomalous phenomenon. He hopes to look into it further now that he has returned home.

  • Light at the End of the Tunnel
    Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60786,00.html
    02:00 AM Oct. 29, 2003 PT
    On this much, scientists and doctors agree: Tiny flashes of infrared light can play a role in healing wounds, building muscle, turning back the worst effects of diabetes and repairing blinded eyes. But what they can't decide on is why all these seemingly miraculous effects happen in the first place.
    For more than a decade, researchers have been studying how light-emitting diodes, or LEDs -- miniscule, ultra-efficient bulbs like the ones found in digital clocks and television remotes -- might aid in the recuperative process. NASA, the Pentagon and dozens of hospitals have participated in clinical trials. Businesses have sold commercial LED zappers to nursing homes and doctors' offices. Magazines and television crews have drooled on cue. Medicare has even approved some LED therapy.
    Despite all that effort, "there's not a clear idea of how this works. There are just working hypotheses," said Marti Jett, chief of the molecular pathology department at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
    One possibility comes from Dr. Harry Whelan, a colleague of Jett's and a neurology professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In a 2002 study backed by the National Institutes of Health and the Persistence in Combat program from the Pentagon's research arm, Whelan used LEDs to restore the vision of blinded rats. Toxic doses of methanol damaged the rats' retinas. But after exposure to the flashes of infrared light, up to 95 percent of the injuries were repaired.
    Human trials have been less dramatic, but still shockingly effective. Using a Food and Drug Administration-approved, handheld LED -- playfully called Warp 10 for its Star Trek style -- wound-healing time was cut in half on board the USS Salt Lake City, a nuclear sub. Diode flashes improved healing of Navy SEALs' training injuries by more than 40 percent. And a Warp 10 prototype was used by U.S. Special Forces units in Iraq, Whelan asserts.
    These LEDs originally were developed by NASA to stimulate plant growth. Now, the agency wants to use the gadgets to build astronauts' muscles during weightlessness. DNA synthesis in muscle cells quintupled after a single application of LEDs flashing at the 680-, 730- and 880-nanometer wavelengths, according to Whelan.
    How exactly all this happened remains a mystery, Jett said. She's identified more than 20 genes that typically are associated with retinal damage, for example, and "the LED alters all of them."
    "Some increased, some decreased," she added. "But they were all brought back to normal."
    Why? Whelan thinks that the LED pulses give the retinal cells extra energy, allowing them to heal more quickly. Ordinarily, mitochondria -- the engines of the cell -- turn sugars into energy. They do so with the help of an enzyme, cytochrome oxidase, which carries electrons during the energy-transfer process. Whelan's theory is that light particles from the LED give the cytochrome electrons it ordinarily would get from sugar. Light becomes a substitute for food, basically.
    Dale Bertwell, the founder of Tampa, Florida-based Anodyne Therapy, a maker of LED medical devices, doesn't buy the explanation.
    "Mitochondria in no way explains the effects" of the LEDs, he said. If Whelan is right, wounds could be healed just by "eating another candy bar."
    What's more, Bertwell added, the $1.2 million the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency just invested in Whelan's work is a waste.
    "They're funding Harry's work to build something that's already in widespread use," Bertwell said.
    That something, Bertwell said, is Anodyne's purse-sized, monochromatic, LED zapper. Life Care Centers of America, a nursing home chain, has bought nearly 200 of the devices, approved by Medicare last year. Gentiva Health Services, a home health-care provider, ordered another 25.
    The devices are being marketed as an antidote -- maybe the first antidote -- to diabetic neuropathy, a deadening in the small nerve endings at the body's extremities. The syndrome is blamed for the vast majority of diabetic amputations.
    Because of all the sugar in a diabetic's blood, the nerve endings can become brittle.
    The diodes' flashes combat this by momentarily breaking nitric oxide away from hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen, Bertwell asserts. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator -- a substance that causes blood vessels to expand. That, in turn, stimulates blood flow, which can cause nerves to break their brittle nature, and grow again.
    Dr. Joseph Prendergast, a Redwood City, California, endocrinologist, says he's used LED therapy on more than 200 patients with diabetic neuropathy. After about 10 treatments of 40 minutes each, 95 percent of those people reported having some feeling restored to their feet. Nearly two-thirds are completely back to normal, Prendergast said.
    But, when asked why he's seen such startling results, Prendergast said, "It just goes up; that's all I know."
    Dr. David Margolis, a pediatrics professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, expressed similar sentiments. He and Whelan are part of a seven-hospital clinical test to see if LEDs can reduce one of the nastier side effects of chemotherapy, called mucositis. It's basically an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, which results in canker sores in the mouth and throat.
    In an earlier study, mucositis in bone-marrow transplant recipients dropped to 58 percent from an expected 70 percent to 90 percent after daily treatment using a 670-nanometer LED array.
    The trial Margolis is involved with started only recently, so he won't pronounce any definite conclusions.
    "But it appears to those of us working in the ward -- the doctors, the nurses -- that patients getting the light treatment get significantly less sores," Margolis noted.
    That being said, he had "absolutely no idea" why this was happening. "It's my first venture into the light," he said.
     

  • MYSTERY SOLVED OVER UTAH'S STRANGE CATTLE DEATHS
    KSL News, Salt Lake City / UT | John Hollenhorst - oCT 05.03
    Original headline: Farmers File Suit Over Cattle Deaths
    Nearly two dozen family farms in Western Utah have been devastated in recent years by the loss of thousands of cows to mysterious ailments.
    Now those farmers say they've figured out what's causing the deaths: electrical currents running through the ground from the Intermountain Power Plant.
    And they're demanding at least $100-million in damages!
    In the last 10 years, many dairy farmers moved to the Delta area from urbanized states, following a dream of wide open spaces and plentiful feed.
    Instead, they say it's been a nightmare caused by electrical currents running through the ground.
    Every dairy farmer expects a small percentage of cows to die each year. But the mortality rate has been five or ten times the national average on some farms in a ten-mile radius from the Intermountain Power Plant.
    Maria Nye/Dairy Farmer: "We brought in experts and we did all the things that a good dairy person should do. It didn't change."
    John Hollenhorst/Eyewitness News: "How bad was it?"
    Maria Nye: "How many tears do you want?"
    John Nye/Dairy Farmer: "When you're working on animals that you know aren't going to get better, and it's ten o'clock at night and you ought to be taking care of your family, you do start to feel anger and frustration."
    Mike Cherniske was losing hundreds of cows per year. And then a big clue hit him. One of the Power Plant's turbines shut down for several weeks for maintenance. Suddenly his cows got much better.
    And when the power plant revved back up, the sickness rate went right back up with it.
    The farmers brought in national experts. They say specialized instruments have repeatedly confirmed measurable stray voltage flowing through the ground.
    That's a known problem for cows.
    And the ground current allegedly has a unique electronic signature from the Intermountain Power Plant.
    A huge $100-million-plus lawsuit is now being fought in California.
    Power officials have refused formal comment, although they've denied the allegation.

  • California Discovery Could Reduce Blackout Risks
    Thursday October 30, 11:30 am ET
    HOT/SHOT's Helicopter-Mounted Radar Invention Yields Surprise Benefit For Spotting Overloaded Lines
    RED BLUFF, Calif., Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- A new radar system tested and proven in northern California could provide an unexpected breakthrough in detecting a leading cause of electrical power failures, potentially averting future outages of the scale of the August blackout and a similar catastrophe on the West Coast in 1996.
    After five years of development, HOT/SHOT Radar Inspections -- a utility inspection company with a 13-year history of power line surveys for more than 100 utilities -- has completed development of polSAR(SM), a radar originally designed to spot rotting wooden poles but also offers a superior method of determining hazardous amounts of line sag.
    Line sag occurs when a voltage overload causes a wire to heat and stretch into the proximity of vegetation or other objects. Line sag has been blamed for triggering the last two major blackouts in the United States -- the August 14, 2003 failure, affecting 50 million Americans in the Northeast and Midwest, as well as a 1996 darkening of the West Coast from Canada to Mexico.
    polSAR was initially engineered for making images of wooden pole interiors from a helicopter or truck. Approximately 220 million timbers carry electric lines throughout North America, each with a lifespan of 40 to 50 years. A chief advantage of polSAR is that it permits a conclusive examination of the entire pole for structural integrity from a distance.
    However, in field tests near Red Bluff earlier this year, utility executives discovered that polSAR images also determine -- to the inch -- proximity of lines to trees or the ground.
    "At first we didn't think anyone would care about the sag data," said Jeffrey Clyde, executive vice president of HOT/SHOT. "We told a manager of the California Independent System Operator that we'd filter out the line images to better view the poles. The response was, 'Hold on. Not so fast.'"
    Line sag has been a growing concern as energy demands soar. Many lines were installed before World War II and are carrying far greater loads than that for which they were designed.
    The most common way to detect sag is through visual inspection by walking or driving along a line, leaving plenty of room for error. A second method utilizes laser imaging, which is more precise, but can cost $20,000 per mile and take months for data interpretation.
    In contrast, polSAR(SM) can provide nearly immediate, precise line sag measurements, at a cost reduction of as much as 40 to 60 percent.
    The polSAR(SM) system was developed from technologies applied to two military uses: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), developed by Sandia National Laboratories for radar mapping of troop movements, and Radar Cross Section (RCS), developed for the U.S. Air Force for testing the ability of the Stealth Bomber to avoid enemy detection.

  • Power Failure Brings Italy to Standstill
    Sun September 28, 2003 06:11 AM ET
    ROME (Reuters) - A nationwide power cut plunged Italy into darkness early Sunday in one of the country's worst blackouts, which authorities blamed on the breakdown of electricity lines from France and Switzerland hit by storms.
    The early morning blackout hit virtually the entire country, stranding more than 30,000 train passengers, forcing airlines to cancel flights and leaving people sleeping on the streets.
    There were no reports of fatalities directly linked to the fourth major power breakdown in Western economies in two months.
    It was Italy's worst blackout in nearly a decade and hit all of the country except the island of Sardinia and some small pockets of the mainland, officials said.
    Eight hours after the power went out, huge sections of the country were still without electricity including Rome, where stranded subway and train passengers slept on the ground.
    "It's chaos, and until the electricity comes back on it will continue to be chaos," said policeman Fabio Bragazzi, 21, at Rome's main Termini train station.
    Italian authorities said the near simultaneous failure of power lines from neighboring Switzerland and France, which provides about one fifth of Italy's electricity at night, triggered the cut at 3:20 a.m. (0120 GMT).
    "It was an exceptional, extraordinary event," Andrea Bollino, chairman of national grid operator GRTN, told Reuters.
    "There was a problem with the connection in Switzerland which then caused a problem with our connection with France and then affected Italy," Bollino said.
    French authorities said severe storms apparently cut two 400,000 volt lines connecting the two countries. Sunday morning the two lines were reconnected, restoring power to large parts of northern and central Italy.
    "The origin of the main failure is not French. There was a failure between Switzerland and Italy around 3 a.m. (0100 GMT)," said Patrick Larradet, a spokesman for French grid operator RTE.
    He said two French power lines came down shortly afterwards, around 3:25 a.m. (1025 GMT) -- most likely due to storms in the region -- but electricity was soon restored.
    Power was expected to be up in the rest of Italy by Sunday afternoon, Industry Minister Antonio Marzano said.
    "WE'RE NOT HAPPY AT ALL"
    The outage brought an early close to an all-night party in the capital where shops, tourist sites and museums were meant to stay open until daybreak. Cash machines in Rome went on the blink.
    Patrons in one Rome cafe without power to run the coffee machine turned to liqueur instead.
    "We're not happy at all. Everything was fine until about 3:30 a.m. (0130 GMT). Then it all happened at once and now we're angry and wet," one sodden party-goer said.
    About 110 trains with some 30,000 passengers were stranded when the power went out. "Almost all trains that were blocked are now brought into the stations," a spokesman for the state railway firm said.
    Italy, which relies on a constant supply of imported power, especially from France, suffered several power outages over the summer as temperatures soared.
    About five million consumers in eastern Denmark and southern Sweden were left in the dark last Wednesday in the worst blackout there in 20 years.
    That followed last month's huge outage that left 50 million North Americans without power for up to two days and a shutdown which paralyzed London for several hours.

     
     

  • Smart Touch-Screens That Can Instantly Sample Your DNA Invented
    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3194600.stm
    Published: 2003/10/17 08:20:10 GMT
    © BBC MMIII
    BBC News Online technology reporter
    An intelligent liquid crystal displays which could bring mobile DNA fingerprinting a step closer has been developed by scientists.
    Joint research between Cambridge University scientists and Epson has yielded an intelligent, ultra-thin display device which combines clever circuitry and sensors.
    The sophisticated device can take samples either through touch or in liquid form, then analyse and store the information.
    The technology could be used on a range of wireless mobile devices, like handheld computers or even wrist watches.
    The scientists who have been researching liquid crystal display (LCD) technology say the wafer-thin sensing displays are about the size of a film negative.
    The technology could be used in a range of testing and sampling applications.
    The collection, retention and storage of DNA is an extremely imprecise art, with concerns of cross contamination or damage
    Gareth Crossman, Liberty
    "Thin Film Transistors (TFT) can be seen as an intelligent version of LCD technology," Professor Piero Migliorato at the University of Cambridge told BBC News Online.
    "The TFT will have an intelligent chip inside programmed to do a set job, be it reading people's fingerprints or telling a person's blood type in the future."
    The chip technology behind the display will be able not only to store but also to analyse information.
    It means in the future, police equipped with mobile devices could take DNA fingerprinting samples from people when they are on the beat.
    This could make it is a lot easier for samples to be recorded and stored, and raises the possibly of using wireless technology to compare database information with samples.
    TFTs are often used to make screens for computers, and this development of it is a result of a long term collaborative research effort between Cambridge University and technology giants Epson.
    The University's Epson lab was set up in 1998 to encourage cross-fertilisation of academic and professional research and development.
    The technology could be seen as timely with legislation on the taking and storing of DNA samples and fingerprints under review in the Criminal Justice Bill.
    Currently, police can only take DNA samples from people once they have been charged with an offence.
    New rules could allow fingerprints and DNA samples to be taken from anyone they arrest, whether they are charged or not.
    Gareth Crossman from civil rights campaign group Liberty said that whether the technology allows DNA to be collected on the move or in the police station, they remain worried about the practice.
    "The concerns we have about DNA remain the same," he said.
    "The collection, retention and storage of DNA is an extremely imprecise art, with concerns of cross contamination or damage."
    Mr Crossman said the more samples that were taken and stored, the more problems that could create.
    Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled police could keep DNA and fingerprints from people charged with a crime, even if they were never convicted.
    In July, the Home Office announced the number of DNA profiles in the database had reached the two million mark.
    Home Secretary David Blunkett said DNA and fingerprint databases had become "vital weapons" in law enforcement.
    In the last three years, there had been a 50% increase in crimes solved using DNA samples, the government said.
    It plans to expand the database by pumping funds of £182 million from April 2000 to 2004.

  • Scientists baffled by spread of stomach bug throughout Scotland
    Sun 12 Oct 2003
    www.news.scotsman.com/
    CASES of a virulent stomach bug have rocketed in Scotland, leaving scientists baffled.
    In the past month more than 160 confirmed samples of cryptosporidium infection have been reported to the country’s main infectious disease centre, more than three times the amount in the same period in previous years.
    Earlier this year, many Scottish tourists returning from holidays in Majorca went down with symptoms of cryptosporidium infection, which is associated with contaminated water. There has also been an outbreak linked to a Glasgow swimming pool. But the Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health (SCIEH) said neither of those problems were large enough to explain the massive recent rise.
    The bug causes diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever and can be fatal to babies, the old and the sick. Up to 60 cases have been identified in the worst-affected regions, such as Lothian. Only Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles have not reported the bug in the past month.
    SCIEH officials have looked at the pattern of cases to see if there is any link or common cause, but found none.
    The centre says in an official report on the problem: "Although some recent cases may have acquired their infection abroad, the increase cannot be explained by tourists returning to Scotland from Alcudia [the affected resort in Majorca].
    "Cases have been reported from all 12 mainland NHS board areas. Some boards have reported as much as 44% of this year’s identifications during this four week period.
    "SCIEH is aware of one recent outbreak associated with a swimming pool in the Greater Glasgow area, but this does not account for most of the present rise, the reason for which remains unknown."

  • Siberia find revives yeti legends
    Thursday, 9 October, 2003
    Is this the foot of the yeti?
    Siberian scientists say they have a discovery on their hands which raises the possibility that the local legend of the yeti - the abominable snowman - is more than mere fiction.
    According to Russian TV, the well-preserved furry limb of a mystery creature was found some 3,500 metres up in the permafrost of the Altay mountains, in Russia's remote Siberia region.
    "I turned the limb over and examined the sole of the foot, and I thought it looked unsual," Sergey Semenov, the mountain-climber who made the find, said.
    "So I decided to bring it back with me."
    Scientific tests and X-rays show that the bones are several thousand years old, but attempts to identify the creature they belonged to remain inconclusive.
      It looks very human, there are many similarities
    Yuriy Malofeyev, the Russian association of veterinary anatomists
    Local opinion on the find, described as "surprisingly well-preserved", is divided.
    There is a long tradition of alleged sightings in the area of what might - or might not - be the abominable snowman.
    Size 36
    Local people say the creature must have walked on snow, because the sole of the foot is furry.
    X-ray tests remain inconclusive
    They have already labelled the discovery as the foot of the yeti.
    But veterinary scientists and academics at the local animal research institute and agragrian university tend towards a more rational explanation.
    "It looks very human," Yuriy Malofeyev, vice-president of the Russian association of veterinary anatomists, told the TV after examining the X-rays.
    "There are many similarities," he said.
    That view appears to be supported by the fact that the length of the foot is about 24 centimetre - normal for a human being.
    "A size 36 shoe would fit him just fine," the TV concluded.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3175926.stm
    pictures

    In possibly related news:

  • Genetic research says the Welsh originated from Siberia
    http://icnorthwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/regionalnews/content_objectid=13499034_method=full_siteid=50142_headline=-Are-we-the-progeny-of-stone-age-Siberians--name_page.html

  • Thailand's natural fireball river
    Friday 10 October 2003
    Hotels are already booked out for the annual spectacle
    Mysterious balls of fire that shoot out of Thailand’s Mekong River every year are naturally occurring and not faked.
    This Friday - the first full moon of the eleventh lunar month - hundreds of red, pink and orange fireballs the size of eggs will soar up into the sky, drawing huge crowds of spectators.
    The event is known as Naga's Fireballs and has been reported by locals for generations, but with no readily available scientific explanation.
    Seeking an explanation
    The ministry of science and technology began an investigation into the phenomenon earlier this year after a television programme claimed the fireballs were actually caused by tracer bullets fired by Laotian soldiers across the border.
    But 93-year old Kohmen Phoh, the most elderly of the residents in Ban Nong Khiate where the Naga's fireball appears, said he had seen the phenomenon since he was a young boy.
    “I call it the Naga's fireball in accordance with what my elders said. It happens naturally and no one stages the event."
    Scientific reason delayed
    Researchers led by Saksit Tridech, the deputy permanent secretary of the ministry, said that the team had studied soil and water samples from the area where the fireballs appear to originate.
    They found that monsoon floods in the area triggered a complex geological process.
    “I call it the Naga's fireball in accordance with what my elders said. It happens naturally and no one stages the event"
    Kohmen Phoh,
    village elder
    "When the complex biogeochemical process occurs at the appropriate time, it could cause several unusual phenomena," Saksit said in a statement, adding that another year of research would be necessary to prove his own personal theory.
    But legend says the flames come from a mythical Naga, or serpent, living in the Mekong river.
    Crowd puller
    The event has become a major tourist attraction and revenue-raiser for the region near the best viewing spot, in Phon Phisai district, 50km outside Nong Khai provincial town.
    Last year more than 100,000 tourists flocked to witness the event, and several hotels in the area are booked out for Friday's event which can cause 50km traffic jams.
    According to descriptions going back more than 100 years, tradition has it that a Naga living under Mekong River shoots the fireball into the air to celebrate the end of Buddhist Lent.
    However, the Naga's fireball does not only takes place in the Mekong River, but also appears in the ponds and rice fields on the Laos side of the border too.
    The event has enjoyed very little publicity until recent times. But now Thai officials are announcing this event through mass media including radio, TV and newspapers.
    People are expected to flock to the banks of the river for three hours after sunset to watch the unexplained phenomenon this Friday.
    AFP

  • Why The Most Revolutionary High-Tech Developments Are Not Being Talked About
    Commentary By Michael S. Malone
    ABCNEWS.com
    Oct. 9 2003— What was the biggest press failure in recent history?
    The boosterism of the national media in the dot-com bubble? Close. The New York Times /Jayson Blair debacle? Closer.The obvious bias of the Los Angeles Times in the California Recall? Almost.
    No, in the eyes of history, the biggest media disaster of our time is one of omission: the manifest, across-the-board failure of the press to educate itself and the general public on the progress and implications of the biotechnology revolution.
    This is a revolution that will transform our lives in ways we can't even imagine. It will likely redefine what it means to be human, and to be alive or dead. It will rewrite the meaning of beauty, health and intelligence, of parenthood, and even of self. And, more than any single event in recorded history, it will change the very direction and fate of the species. There is no bigger story than this — and it is not being covered.
    This is professional negligence and malpractice of the highest order. A failure so complete that the press feels no guilt about it, and the public doesn't even understand it is being ill-served.
    The assumption seems to be that if anything important happens in biotech, we'll hear about it. But will we? And even if we do — what if it is too late to do anything about it? Are we really willing to leave the big moral questions to industry insiders? Is this really the position we want to be in vis-à-vis the most important story of our time?
    Revolution in Gene Chips
    What got me thinking about this was a brief new product announcement made recently by Affymetrix for a new gene chip, the Human Plus Array. Have you ever heard of Affymetrix? Do you know what a gene chip is?
    No? Then let me explain, based upon my own limited knowledge. A gene chip is a small glass chip containing an internal matrix similar to that found in integrated circuits about twenty years ago (in fact, some of these chips have been fabricated using old semiconductor equipment). Into this matrix, biotech companies such as Affymetrix, Agilent and Applied Biosystems, all of Silicon Valley, insert fragments of the 35,000 known human genes.
    In practice, doctors and researchers can inject these chips with a blood sample or other fluid and then 'read' how different parts of the genome react to that sample. In theory, this will lead to the development of drugs and even genetic therapies custom-designed for each patient. It is also the first step in the long march to true bio-silicon interfaces — such as memory chips for the brain.
    The Affymetrix announcement represents a milestone, in that for the first time all of 35,000 genes have been stuffed onto a single chip — effectively cutting in half the price for the industry standard two-chip set to about $300-$500 per chip.
    Both Agilent and Applied Biosystems have responded to the announcement by noting that their two-chip sets contain longer fragments than those found on the Human Plus Array, and thus, they claim, are more sensitive and offer better performance. Meanwhile, you can be sure they are rushing out their own one chip solutions.
    The Biotech Train Is Roaring
    Have you heard this kind of competitive trash talk before? Sure, it's the voice of the digital world, from software to PCs to servers. What you're hearing is the sound of Moore's Law in action. And you know what that means.
    It was just three years ago, at an industry conference in San Francisco, that a venture capitalist noted that for the very first time, biotech — in particular, the field of bioinformatics — was beginning to exhibit the kind of technological acceleration until now only found in electronics. And now, when almost no one is looking, here we are: the biotech train is starting to roar down the tracks.
    Moore's Law, as I've written many times, is a powerful, magnificent, and often dangerous force. It creates extraordinary opportunities, and creates enormous change. Millions of lives in the world today are far better off because of what Moore's Law did through the digital revolution.
    But Moore's Law can be dangerous too. Its exponential growth is all-but beyond the capacity of human beings to cope with. For example, it will take generations for us to fully assimilate just what happened in the PC Age from 1984 to 1998. The change Moore's Law produces is so fast, and so sweeping, that it quickly escapes any attempt to control it. Just look at the Internet.
    Ultimately, the greatest lesson to be learned from the electronics revolution is that if you hope to have any impact on Moore's Law you'd better do it early, in the first few generations, before the doubling grains of rice on the chessboard mount up so high that they engulf you. After that, it takes everything you've got just to keep from being buried alive.
    That brings us back to the biotech revolution and the Affymetrix announcement. The very existence of the Human Plus Array is evidence that not only is the acceleration underway, but that it is already well along. In other words, we are already running out of time to have any say in this next, far more profound (and intimate) revolution. Very soon now, we will be reduced to merely reacting to each new biotech generation as they crash over us, to the metronome of Moore's Law, every couple of years.
    Why Word Isn't Getting Out
    How can this be? Why didn't you hear about it? Because biotech is complicated stuff (though, frankly, not necessarily any more complicated than the silicon gates and Boolean algebra of the digital world).
    When reporters hear terms like "recombinant DNA" they have a tendency to run in the other direction. Or, if forced, to try to turn the narrative into the standard "medical miracle" feature story. I found the Affymetrix story in the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the company's hometown paper. How many other papers carried the story, much less an analysis of its implications?
    And television is even worse than print, mostly because biotech is too complicated for one-liners and too goopy for a visual medium. So, once again, the biotech story is tarted up as a medical story — The Next Big Panacea — and the larger story is once again lost. And, as tech taught us, when you only cover applications you're already too late. As near as I can tell, the only full-time biotech television reporter in the world today is Marc Levenson of Tech TV. Bless him, because it must be a lonely job.
    A second truth about Moore's Law is that, ironically, even as it presents a very accurate tool for predicting the future of a given technology, it obscures the larger social and cultural implications of that change. In 1972 you could have predicted today's Pentium and Athlon chips, but not e-commerce or music downloads or cyberterrorism.
    By the same token, today we can confidently predict that the next great step — mapping the functions of all proteins created by human DNA — will be completed within a generation. But it is beyond our ken to imagine what the world will be like when we eradicate all 3,000 genetic diseases and, in the process, learn to control every aspect of what it means to be human.
    All that we can say with any confidence is that now that it has jumped aboard Moore's Law, the biotech revolution will make the electronics revolution look like a footnote. And that should give us pause.
    We are about to face the greatest challenge any human generation has ever known. Shouldn't we be preparing for it? Shouldn't the arbiters of information in our society be informing us, educating us, WARNING us?
    Why have they let us down?
    Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.
     

  • Study: Sonar May Cause Bends Disease in Dolphins
    Wed Oct 8, 2003
    LONDON (Reuters) - Sonar may cause a type of decompression sickness in whales and dolphins similar to the "bends" in humans, scientists said on Wednesday.
    Although it seems an unlikely illness for the aquatic creatures, researchers from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands have found bubbles in the tissue of stranded whales and dolphins similar to the effects of decompression sickness (DCS) in humans.
    "The only way we can explain these findings is that it is a condition very similar to decompression sickness in humans," Dr Paul Jepson, co-ordinator of the UK Marine Mammal Stranding Project which contributed to the research, said in an interview.
    "Sonar may cause a disease like the bends," he said, adding that more research was needed to confirm the results.
    The finding, reported in the science journal Nature, is the first evidence of a bends-like illness in the creatures.
    Scientists suspect sonar signals disorientate the animals forcing them to come up to the surface too quickly, which could cause the creation of damaging nitrogen bubbles in their tissue.
    Both low and mid-frequency sonar have been linked to whale strandings.
    "It is widely accepted that there is a link between naval sonar use and mass strandings, predominately of big whales; what hasn't been fully understood is what the mechanism would be," Jepson added.
    Autopsies by Spanish scientists on 10 of 14 beaked whales stranded in the Canary Islands after a multinational military exercise last year also showed evidence of DCS in the animals.
    The creatures started to appear on the beaches about four hours after the start of the mid-frequency sonar activity.
    "Beaked whales have the highest levels of nitrogen in their tissues normally because they dive so deep and that would be consistent with why it is the beaked whales that are most severely affected by sonar exercises," Jepson said.
    Military sonar blasts areas of ocean with sound waves to detect submarines. Environmentalists say it produces noise levels that may harm marine mammals or alter their migration.
    A mass stranding of whales in the Bahamas in 2000 has also been linked to a sonar system.
    "The detailed examination of the mass stranded whales in the Canaries in 2002 suggests the naval sonar could induce a condition similar to DCS," Professor Antonio Fernandez of the University of Las Palmas said in a statement.
    DCS is caused by a rapid decrease in pressure of either air or water, usually affecting scuba and deep-sea divers. If the transition between the pressures occurs too quickly nitrogen bubbles form in the blood and tissue.
    "This new evidence from our study of marine mammal diseases in the UK challenges the widely held notion that cetaceans (marine mammals) cannot suffer from decompression sickness," Jepson added.

  • The mystery surrounding a rash of dead whales found along the Maine coast in recent weeks deepened Friday as researchers examined the carcasses of a humpback and a rarely seen beaked whale.
    Saturday, October 4, 2003
    Portland Press Herald
    Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
    Eric Harrison, left, a volunteer from the Marine Animal Lifeline in Westbrook, and Patrick Morray, a volunteer with UNE's Marine Animal Rehab Center, dig a pit at Parsons' Beach in Kennebunk on Friday to bury the remains of a rarely seen beaked whale that washed up on the beach.
     The mystery surrounding a rash of dead whales found along the Maine coast in recent weeks deepened Friday as researchers examined the carcasses of a humpback in Pemaquid and a rarely seen beaked whale in Kennebunk.
    Also Friday, federal investigators were checking into a new report of a minke whale carcass seen near Friendship.
    The flurry of activity Friday came as a team of federal investigators was already in Maine to investigate the death of at least five minke whales along the Maine coast between Sept. 13 and Sept. 28.
    Minke whales and humpback whales are relatively common in the Gulf of Maine. But never have so many been found dead in such a short period of time, officials said. The appearance of a beaked whale was equally unusual.
    "Adding that to the list further adds to the mystery of the situation," said Terry Stockwell of the Maine Department of Marine Resources. "I don't know what's going on."
    Mystified state and federal officials also said beachgoers have reported an unusually large number of dead seals along the coast this year. "Is it related? I don't know," said George Liles of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
    The beaked whale that washed onto Parsons' Beach in Kennebunk drew special interest because the species is rarely seen alive or dead. They swim offshore, diving in the deep ocean waters for fish and squid.
    Scientists who examined the 15-foot-long whale Friday could not say which species of beaked whale it was or estimate its age.
    "There's just really not that much known about these animals," said Erica Gebhart of the University of New England's Marine Science Education and Research Center, which helped with the examination.
    Researchers collected tissue and bone samples and planned to examine its head using a CT scan. They also removed the whale's uterus, which contained an unborn calf perhaps 12 inches long.
    "You don't like to see that. You know, it's bad enough already," said Heather Koopman of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which sent a team to conduct the exam.
    The researchers eventually cut up the carcass and buried the flesh in the sand. The skeleton was saved for the Smithsonian Institution.
    There were no obvious signs of injury that might have killed the whale. "It had no evidence of being hit by a boat or of a fisheries entanglement," Koopman said.
    The 40- to 50-foot-long humpback whale was found floating and was towed onto Pemaquid Beach, where it also was examined Friday. There was no immediate sign of injuries to that whale either, Liles said.
    At least two of the minke whales found last month had marks in their flesh that appeared to have been caused by fishing lines or nets. It wasn't immediately clear what type of gear - nets or lines - caused the marks or whether entanglement caused the deaths.
    One of the minkes had an unusual square-shaped cut in its abdomen, fueling speculation that it had been lanced in order to sink it and conceal it.
    Killing or harming whales and other marine mammals is prohibited by the U.S. Marine Mammal Act.
    Federal and state officials said Friday they still don't know the cause of any of the whale deaths or what role fishing gear is playing in the phenomenon.
    They met last week with representatives of the herring trawler fleet that has been dragging nets through schools of herring along the Maine coast. Herring also provide food for large fish and whales, including minkes and humpbacks. Although some are pointing fingers at the trawlers, the representatives who attended the meeting said there had been no reports of whales in their nets.
    It is expected to take months to analyze the tissue samples and other evidence collected from the whales. An investigation into the discovery of more than 10 large whale carcasses offshore in July is still not complete, although officials suspect those deaths were caused by toxic algae that was poisoning their food supply.
    Food poisoning also will be one of the potential factors investigated in the more recent whale deaths. The discovery of carcasses in the past three weeks coincides with an unusually severe occurrence of toxic red tide algae along the Maine coast. The toxin in red tide algae builds up in shellfish and fish and is highly poisonous to people and whales.
    Researchers said they also will look for damage to the ears of the beaked whale. Low-level underwater sonar used by the U.S. Navy has been linked to whale deaths in other parts of the world, though Liles said it is not believed to have been a factor here.
    After the discovery of the beaked whale, state and federal officials theorized that there may well be multiple causes of the deaths, coinciding in time.
    Because beaked whales swim in different waters and eat different prey than minkes and humpbacks, it's less likely that any one cause - such as fishing-gear entanglements or food poisoning - could have killed them all.
    "It's hard to think of an event that could explain all of these findings," Liles said.
     
  • 'Untreatable' Pig Disease Fears Grow In NZ
    news.com.au
    10-3-3
    WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Agriculture officials investigating a pig farm where a third of young piglets have died said that it may be New Zealand's first outbreak of an untreatable pig disease.
    It would be two weeks before officials could confirm the presence of the suspected disease, known as post-weaning multisystemic wasting syndrome, which usually kills affected pigs aged six to 12 weeks.
    The disease is connected with other pig viruses such as porcine parvovirus, said Allen Bryce, national surveillance manager for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
    New Zealand and Australia were among the few countries not to have the disease, Bryce said.
    New Zealand's pig herd is estimated at about 341,000.
    He said officials were investigating the source of breeding boars bought by the farm and had checked for any links with imported semen, though the farmer had not used artificial insemination.
    Bryce said North American pig semen was still being sold from imports under a permit which predated awareness in New Zealand of the wasting disease.
    The disease, identified in the early 1990s and confirmed in Canada in 1996, has been found with increasing frequency in pig herds in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.
    Bryce said the affected piggery was isolated from others and did not pose a risk while the investigation was carried out.
    He declined to identify the farm or the region where it is located.

  • Change limits farmers from suing pesticide-makers
    2003-10-05
    USA TODAY
    WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has adopted a new policy that aims to cut off farmers' ability to sue pesticide and herbicide makers when bug-and weedkillers don't work as promised on their labels and damage crops.
    The new position, not announced publicly, is a sharp reversal in federal policy toward hundreds of thousands of farmers or anyone else who might claim damages from pesticide use.
    In recent years, the government generally has supported people's right to sue manufacturers of pesticides that are alleged to have harmed crops or not performed as promised. But the administration is taking the position that federal law bars such suits, according to legal briefs and an Environmental Protection Agency memo obtained by USA TODAY.
    The new interpretation will carry great weight in the courts. Farmers who file product liability, or tort, suits on charges of pesticide damage must defeat the government's position.
    The policy shift is a huge win for the pesticide industry, which pushed for the change. Pesticide-makers face millions of dollars in suits each year alleging that their products caused damage.
    Farm groups have mixed reactions to the new federal stance: some say there must be limits on lawsuits over pesticide performance or manufacturers will hesitate to experiment with new products that could help growers.
    Tom Buis of the National Farmers Union, which represents 300,000 independent farms, acknowledges the conflict. "But if a pesticide not only doesn't do what it says it's supposed to do, but also kills your crop, that could cost you a year's income. There has to be some legal recourse, and (this change) could really limit that."
    The administration's shift is based on a reinterpretation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The act directs the EPA to set label requirements for agricultural chemicals — warnings on use and safety — and bars states from setting stricter rules.
    Courts have had mixed opinions on whether the law "pre-empts" damage suits filed in state courts by farmers who have had bad results with a product. Many have ruled that pesticide-makers who comply with federal labeling rules are insulated from claims that they didn't warn of potential risks.
    In 1999, the Clinton administration asserted that the labeling law did not block such claims. It took that stand in the case of some California walnut farmers who sought $150,000 for damage to three orchards after they mixed two pesticides that didn't warn against combined use. The farmers lost, but the federal position became an oft-cited legal pillar for farmers in other pesticide damage cases.
    Last month, EPA General Counsel Robert Fabricant laid the legal basis for reversing the Clinton policy in a confidential memo. "Developments in the law and a reanalysis ... (of) the potential impacts of allowing such crop damage tort claims has led EPA to rethink the agency position," he wrote.
    The memo echoes arguments made by administration lawyers in a brief filed this year in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, the administration said the court should nullify a pesticide damage suit brought by Texas peanut farmers who claimed their crops were destroyed after they used a manufacturer-recommended mixture of two pesticides. The court did not rule on the merits of the administration's position.
    Douglas Nelson of CropLife America, a pesticide trade group, says the new federal stance "corrects a misread of the law."
    Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council says the change immunizes pesticide-makers from legitimate damage claims. The new policy also could bolster pesticide-makers' contention that federal labeling insulates them from suits alleging that their products caused broader health and environmental harm, Olson says.

  • Bush steps up fight against European safety testing
    The Independent on Sunday (U.K.)09/21/03
    Geoffrey Lean
    09/20/2003
    President George Bush is mounting an intensive campaign to force European countries to drop safety tests expected to save thousands of lives each year, internal US government documents seen by The Independent on Sunday reveal. Britain, which has been generally supportive, last week denounced the measures as "disastrously wrong".
    The documents - which include diplomatic cables signed by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell - show that the Bush administration has threatened Europe with trade sanctions if it goes ahead with the tests, which are designed to protect workers and the public from highly toxic chemicals.
    It has already succeeded in weakening the proposals, even though they were approved in principle two years ago by EU governments and the European Parliament. And environmentalists fear that Mr Bush - with Tony Blair's help - will now succeed in emasculating them altogether.
    The tests are designed to identify the most dangerous chemicals threatening Europeans, including cancer-causing and "gender-bender" substances, so that they can be controlled. Only a tiny proportion of the 100,000 or so man-made chemicals used in the EU has ever been tested for the effects on the people who use them.
    It plans to reverse the burden of proof by getting industry to provide evidence of the hazards or safety of the chemicals it sells, rather than marketing them and waiting for governments to try to pick out the most dangerous ones when they have already done harm.
    The European Commission estimates that it would prevent up to 4,300 cases of cancer a year among chemical workers alone; far more lives could be expected to be saved among the public at large.
    The US pressure seems to be changing British policy. Up to now Britain has taken a generally favourable approach to the directive. But last week Patricia Hewitt denounced it as "disastrously wrong".

     

  • It's Hasta La Vista To $9 Billion Enron Lawsuit If The Governator Is Selected
    By Greg Palast
    10-3-3
    It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.
    The wannabe governor has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.
    Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits they carried off.
    Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.
    It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.
    Now follow the action. One month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.
    How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.
    While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by Ken Lay.
    But Bush's boys on the commission have a problem. The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering," fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).
    So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on each dollar they filched.
    Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.
    New Problem: the guy most likely to replace Davis is not Mr. Musclehead, but Cruz Bustamante, even a bigger threat to the power companies than Davis. Solution: smear Cruz because -- heaven forbid! -- he took donations from Injuns (instead of Ken Lay).
    The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.
    So think about this. The state of California is in the hole by $8 billion for the coming year. That's chump change next to the $8 TRILLION in deficits and surplus losses planned and incurred by George Bush. Nevertheless, the $8 billion deficit is the hanging rope California's right wing is using to lynch Governor Davis.
    Yet only Davis and Bustamante are taking direct against to get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of the state by Enron, Reliant, Dynegy, Williams Company and the other Texas bandits who squeezed the state by the bulbs.
    But if Arnold is selected, it's 'hasta la vista' to the $9 billion. When the electricity emperors whistle, Arnold comes -- to the Peninsula Hotel or the Governor's mansion. The he-man turns pussycat and curls up in their lap.
    I asked Mr. Muscle's PR people to comment on the new Enron memos -- and his strange silence on Bustamante's suit or Davis' petition. But Arnold was too busy shaving off his Hitlerian mustache to respond.
    The Enron memos were discovered by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Los Angeles,
    www.ConsumerWatchdog.org
    http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=283&row=0

  • Pilotless plane to fly routinely in civilian airspace- Northrop Grumman hoping to stir interest in Pilotless planes from Commercial Airlines
    21 August 03
    NewScientist.com
    The US Air Force's Global Hawk became the first pilotless aeroplane to be given permission to fly routinely in civilian airspace on Thursday.
    The US Federal Aviation Administration issued the USAF and Northrop Grumman, who make the jet plane, a certificate of authorisation (COA) allowing the RQ-4 Global Hawk to enter national airspace with almost as much ease as a piloted plane.
    Previously the USAF was required to file a detailed flight plan with the FAA at least 30 days in advance. Now the majority of the red tape has been cut making it possible for an unarmed Global Hawk to "file-and-fly" even on the same day. The first use of the new COA will be a flight to Germany in October.
    According to Northrop Grumman, the Global Hawk's ability to see-and-avoid other aircraft has convinced the FAA that it is safe. Moreover, during its missions Global Hawk is programmed to climb to altitudes over 60,000 feet, well above commercial traffic.
    However, air safety campaigners are horrified. "I think this is really insane," says Gail Dunham of the National Air Disaster Alliance, a pressure group based in Washington DC. "I understand the need to have military drones," says Dunham. But they should be restricted to military airspace only, she says.
    Pre-programmed mission
    Global Hawks carry out pre-programmed missions and are monitored by pilots from the ground via a satellite link. The plane was the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific Ocean, a 22-hour mission involving just two "clicks" of a mouse from the ground operator.
    The previous 30-day notice period allowed time to scrutinise both the flight plan and the support infrastructure required to track and control the plane. But Northrop Grumman's spokeswoman told New Scientist that the performance and safety record of the Global Hawk, especially during military operations in Afghanistan, has now demonstrated its reliability.
    The USAF has only ever lost three Global Hawks, says Northrop Grumman. The first was during the plane's development, when someone accidentally tested the self-destruct program. As a result the plane flew to a pre-programmed, remote location and nose-dived into ground as its operators looked on helplessly. Since then two more were lost while flying in combat zones.
    However, Pentagon data on the number of crashes per hours flown show that the Global Hawk has a crash rate 50 times higher than the F-16 fighter, a plane that frequently flies more dangerous missions and at lower altitudes.
    Northrop Grumman is hoping to get similar grants for its armed version of the Global Hawk. But such military grants are just the thin end of the wedge for Dunham: "My concern is that commercial airlines are interested in applications like this too."
     
  • Unmanned Pentagon blimp is 25 times size of Goodyear's
    Associated Press
    Sept. 30, 2003 07:29 AM
    AKRON, Ohio - It's back to the future for the Pentagon.
    The latest high-tech weapon might look awfully familiar to a World War I Zeppelin pilot. Lockheed Martin has a contract worth at least $40 million to develop a high-altitude airship for use in homeland defense.
    The solar-powered and helium-filled airship would patrol at 65,000 feet and be 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp.
    Lockheed Martin officials say the airship is a great marriage of old and new technologies.
    While the view might be great from way up there, no one will get to see it. The high-tech airship will be unmanned and operated from the ground via computer controls.

  • Wesley Clark - Latest contender for president comes from long line of Rabbis
    Source: JTA
    Published: September 17, 2003 Author: Mr. Ron Kampeas
    For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use.
    WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (JTA) — Raised a Southern Baptist who later converted to Roman Catholicism, Gen. Wesley Clark knew just what to say when he strode into a Brooklyn yeshiva in 1999, ostensibly to discuss his leadership of NATO´s victory in Yugoslavia.
    "I feel a tremendous amount in common with you," the uniformed four-star general told the stunned roomful of students.
    "I am the oldest son, of the oldest son, of the oldest son — at least five generations, and they were all rabbis."
    The incident could be a signal of how Clark, who became the 10th contender in the Democratic run for the presidency on Wednesday, relates to the Jews and the issues dear to them.
    Apparently Clark, 58, revels in his Jewish roots.
    He told The Jewish Week in New York, which first reported the yeshiva comment in 1999, that his ancestors were not just Jews, but members of the priestly caste of Kohens.
    Clark´s Jewish father, Benjamin Kanne, died when he was 4, but he has kept in touch with his father´s family since his 20s, when he rediscovered his Jewish roots. He is close to a first cousin, Barry Kanne, who heads a pager company in Georgia.
    Clark shares more than sentimental memories with Jews.
    He couples liberal domestic views that appeal to much of the Jewish electorate with a soldier´s sympathy for Israel´s struggle against terror.
    Appearing in June on "Meet the Press" on CBS, Clarke said he agreed with President Bush´s assessment that Israel should show more restraint, a reference to the policy of targeting terrorist leaders for assassination.
    "But the problem is," Clark continued, "when you have hard intelligence that you´re about to be struck, it´s the responsibility of a government to take action against that intelligence and prevent the loss of lives. It´s what any society would expect of its leadership. So there´s a limit to how much restraint can be shown."
    Speaking to the New Democrat Network this year, Clark said that dismantling Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat´s Ramallah headquarters was "a legitimate military objective from their perspective.
    "For the Israelis, this is a struggle really for the existence of Israel," Clark said in remarks quoted on a support group´s Web site.
    Clark is also tough on neighboring Arab states, expecting more from them in nudging the Palestinians toward peace.
    He has said he would like to see Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a "contact group" similar to the alliance that Serb-friendly Russia joined to force the Serbs to back down in Kosovo. He blames Saudi Arabia for allowing extremist strains of Islam to spread.
    The former NATO leader also opposes any active international role in policing the West Bank until the political situation is settled, a view that Israelis — nervous at relinquishing control to foreign troops on their borders — would appreciate.
    Domestically, Clark favors many of the liberal views popular with many Jews. He is pro-choice, and is strongly in favor of separating church from state.
    "In order to have freedom of religion, you´ve got to protect the state from the church," he is quoted saying on his supporters´ Web site.
    One of the leaders of the Draft Clark campaign said Clark´s strength on foreign policy would neutralize an advantage President Bush now has with Jews, and would bring the debate back to domestic issues, where the Bush administration is weaker with Jews.
    "It makes him credible and allows him to focus on domestic policy," Brent Blackaby said in a telephone interview from Clark´s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Ark.
    Two of Clark´s top advisers are Jews who had prominent roles in the Clinton and Gore campaigns. Eli Segal was a top adviser to President Clinton in his first term; Ron Klain helped run Vice President Al Gore´s 2000 campaign.

  • And Now A Chance To Bid Farewell To Mr. Bush
    From Michael Moore September 23, 2003
    Last week, over 30,000 of you from my list sent letters to Wesley Clark urging to him to run. And, hey, um -- it looks like it helped! He announced on Wednesday and by Sunday he was #1 in the Newsweek poll on the 10 Democratic candidates. By yesterday, according to the CNN/Time poll, he was nine points ahead of his nearest rival -- and three percentage points ahead of Bush if the election were held today.
    But now the hard part begins. In my open letter to General Clark, while strongly encouraging him to run, I told him that I was not yet endorsing him -- I have no plans to endorse anyone at this point -- yet I thought his voice should be heard in this campaign. Why? Because I heard him say things that I think the American public needs to hear.
    My wife and I were invited over to a neighbor's home 12 days ago where Clark told those gathered that certain people, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, called him immediately after the attacks on September 11th and asked him to go on TV to tell the country that Saddam Hussein was "involved" in the attacks. He asked them for proof, but they couldn't provide any. He refused their request.
    Standing in that living room 12 nights ago, Clark continued to share more private conversations. In the months leading up the Iraq War, friends of his at the Pentagon -- high-ranking career military officers -- told him that the military brass did NOT want this war in Iraq, that it violated the Powell Doctrine of "start no war if you don't know what your exit strategy is." They KNEW we would be in this mess, and they asked the General, in his role now as a television commentator, to inform the American people of this folly. And, as best he could, that's what he did.
    I don't know whether I am violating any confidence here, but I think all of you have a right to know these things -- and I left there that night convinced that this pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-affirmative action retired general should be in the debates so that the American people can hear what I heard. The public needs to see and hear what he's all about so we can make up our own minds about him. Now, thanks to all the encouragement you gave him to run, we will have a chance to do just that.
    He may very well turn out to be much less than what we thought. Or he may be our best and greatest hope in removing George W. Bush. Whatever the outcome, let's all agree on one thing: There are enough Democrats running, this time around, who stand for most of the things that we stand for. We will not find ourselves having to choose between the "evil of two lessers" in the Democratic primaries. When we know more about each of them and the dust has settled, then we need to unite with each other to keep our eyes on the prize: Bush Removal in '04.
    But removal is not enough to turn our country around. We have to stay on these Democrats to do their jobs. We know from experience how spineless they can be. Our job is to keep pushing them to be more progressive in their actions and positions. And we need to continue to build independent, third party movements on the local level which will, in part, let them know that they do not automatically have us in their hip pocket.
    That is why I am not endorsing anyone right now -- and I caution you not to throw your whole self behind any of them until they can state clearly what they are going to do on certain issues. If we give them our support before insisting they do this, what leverage will we have to mold them into the candidate we -- and not the political consultants -- want them to be?
    For instance, I sat in a room with Howard Dean a couple of months ago and heard him say he supports the death penalty "in certain cases." He probably believes he needs to say this to get elected. What he needs to hear from us are the facts about how many innocent people have been released from death row, people who were about to be executed. We need to show Gov. Dean the right way to address this issue -- by calling for a moratorium on the death penalty until, if ever, this problem of potentially executing the innocent can be solved.
    When I watched Howard Dean give his speech announcing his candidacy, he spoke for nearly a half hour. How many times did he say the word "Iraq?"
    None.
    And he's supposed to be the anti-war candidate! Well, what I'm saying is, let's cut him some slack. He clearly has been against the war, even if he did fail to mention it (the #1 issue of the day) in his speech. We cannot be so quick to want to dismiss him or sink back into our cynicism of believing that all politicians suck. And when Dean says he wouldn't cut the Pentagon budget, he just needs to be educated. So the best way to support Dean right now is to let him know how you feel about these issues and that, if he wants your vote, he has to state clearly that he will cut the Pentagon budget and use that money for the things this country really needs.
    Likewise, Clark's first 24 hours as a candidate resembled a Marx Brothers movie. His position on the war, depending on what paper you read, changed about six dozen times. Only one thing was clear -- this guy is not a professional politician! But then, isn't that a good thing? The press has complained that Clinton is secretly behind him. Both right and left wing pundits have roared over that one. Are they that out of touch with the average American that they don't recognize, when the word "Clinton" is mentioned these days, a wave of wistful nostalgia sweeps through a majority of Americans? As most of you know, I had many problems with Clinton, but I can at least realize that when Americans think "Clinton Era," they think of better days -- regardless of just how better they really were. So if you think that by "exposing" the Clinton connection to Clark is going to turn people off, think again. Every time it's reported, Clark's numbers go up.
    But it seemed like on Day One of his campaign, General Clark was listening too much to the Arkansas politicos and not enough to his own heart. When you're a Rhodes Scholar (as he is), you have to hate others trying to turn your head into a bowl of spaghetti.
    By the time Day Two rolled around, the general had heard from all of us (a big collective "WHAT THE F#@%?!" so to speak), and he straightened things out in an interview with the Associated Press. He said, without equivocation: "Let's make one thing real clear: I would never have voted for this war. I've got a very consistent record on this. There was no imminent threat. This was not a case for preemptive war."
    Now Clark will be in his first debate this Thursday. As the others have been campaigning and debating for months now, there is no way he will be up to their speed. He doesn't have to be. I hope he is just himself so we can see where he stands on many of the issues that he has yet to weigh in on (NAFTA, health care specifics, etc.).
    The day Clark made his announcement, I was in the former Yugoslavia. Clark was the NATO commander during the Kosovo War. If you've seen my film ("Bowling for Columbine") you know that the bombing of civilians in Kosovo is something that bothers me to this day. That is why I put it in my movie. The 19 countries of NATO have yet to account for this decision to bomb in this way. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Clark wanted to use ground troops instead of relying on the bombing (less civilians would be killed that way). Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen overruled him. They didn't want to risk having any American casualties; they preferred the "clean" way of killing from 30,000 feet above. Clark, apparently to undermine them, went on TV and took his case to the American people. Cohen was furious and told him to "get your (bleeping) face" off the TV. He and the Pentagon then orchestrated his firing.
    Years later, many analysts agree that the Kosovo War would have ended much sooner -- and fewer civilians would have been killed -- had the White House listened to Clark and let him use the ground troops to stop Milosevic's genocide of the people in Kosovo.
    Is that the way it went? I'd like to know. And that's one reason why we have election campaigns -- so we can find out things like this. I hope someone asks General Clark the question.
    What I do know is that the war we are in NOW is not called Kosovo, but Iraq. That is the war I am trying to stop. That is the war Clark says he will stop. If we have a former general, who may have done some things that some of us don't like -- but he is now offering to be an advocate for peace -- why would any of us want to reject this?
    And who among the other candidates does not have blood on his hands? John Kerry? He killed people in Vietnam. Bob Graham? He executed people as governor of Florida. Howard Dean? He says he would have voted in favor of bombing Afghanistan (at least 3,000 civilians slaughtered) and he's already said he would execute people on death row. So would Edwards. Gephardt voted for both wars. Dennis Kucinich used to vote for laws restricting a woman's right to an abortion, potentially forcing women back to the alley and, for many of them, to certain death.
    No one is innocent here. And yet, there is, in everyone, a chance for redemption. John Kerry bravely led the anti-war movement when he returned from Vietnam. Dennis Kucinich changed his position and now supports a woman's right to choose. Howard Dean (with Kucinich) stood alone against the Iraq War when it was not the popular thing to do. People change. If we don't accept this, we are never going to get rid of Bush.
    We, the voters, have a job to do right now: Remain strong and steadfast in pushing these candidates to behave, straighten up, and do the right thing. There will be plenty of time to get behind the one candidate who is nominated to defeat Bush. What we should be doing now is making our voices heard so that we can influence them to take the right positions.
    Back in February, Patrick Tyler of the New York Times wrote, "there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion." To paraphrase him, I would say that there are now actually ELEVEN campaigns running in this race -- those of the ten announced candidates, and OURS. Those 10 who are running are up against something mightier than any of their fellow candidates -- they must face OUR collective conscience and will. That will is a powerful force -- and we shouldn't give it up until we start hearing and seeing things from these candidates that we expect and demand.
    So, Howard Dean, if you want my vote, promise me that you'll cut the Pentagon budget and call for a moratorium on the death penalty. Wesley Clark, if you want my vote, tell me how you'll guarantee health care to every single American and that, even though you're a hunter, you'll push for stronger gun control laws. Dennis Kucinich, if it were you vs. Bush today, I'd hope that you would have done the work needed to convince the majority of Americans to vote for you. Carol Moseley Braun, if the moderator at the debate on Thursday ignores you for the first 15 minutes (as George Stephanopoulos did back in the May debate), I hope you won't wait your turn and will just jump right in-we're long overdue for a woman President. And Al Sharpton, just keep being you and cutting through all the b.s. in these debates -- you produce the stinging laugh we all need right now.
    Let the games begin, and let's all hope that the only loser in all of this is George W. Bush.
    Yours,
    Michael Moore
    www.michaelmoore.com
    [email protected]

     
    Hmmm, like they say "once is an accident, twice is a coiccidence, but three times is a conspiracy".

  • Mystery flying muck strikes in Waikato
    24 September 2003
    By TRACEY COOPER
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2669531a10,00.html
    A Te Awamutu home is the latest to be hit by a mystery airborne substance.
    Hamilton roofer Peter Lowe discovered the brown substance splattered across the new roof he is working on when he turned up to work yesterday.
    "It looks human to me," he said, carefully avoiding touching the dried-out splatters.
    The roof has been hit by a 2m-wide strip of brown muck which crosses the house in a south to north direction.
    Mr Lowe said whatever the substance was, it must have landed between 5pm Monday and 7am Tuesday.
    "I've been doing this for 17 years and I've never seen anything like it," he said.
    The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) yesterday ruled out aeroplane sewage as the cause of a similar incident in Takapu Valley, near Wellington, last week.
    Chemical analysis of the substance taken from windows of the house had confirmed no trace of chemicals from an aircraft toilet, CAA spokesman Bill Sommer said.

  • Brown muck not plane sewage - CAA
    23 September 2003
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2668389a4560,00.html
    Whatever it was that spattered a Takapu Valley farmhouse with foul-smelling brown muck earlier this month, it was not sewage from an overhead plane, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says.
    Chemical analysis of the substance taken from windows of the house, near Wellington, had confirmed no trace of chemicals from an aircraft toilet, ruling out the possibility it had come from there, CAA spokesman Bill Sommer said today.
    Takapu Valley farmers Shonnie Gordon and Lloyd Hyde believed the muck, which fell on their home on September 14, was plane sewage.
    But the test results, coupled with the altitude and sped of the plane, was a convincing argument against that possibility, Mr Sommer said.
    However, CAA safety investigators would look further into what the material might be and where it had come from.
    Ms Gordon has taken her own sample said yesterday she would take it to a laboratory specialising in human faeces later this week, depending on the results of the CAA's tests.

  • UFO Sewage Not From Plane, Says Official
    Independent Online - South Africa
    9-24-3
    WELLINGTON (Sapa-DPA) -- The mystery of what unidentified flying object dumped a load of what looks like and smells like sewage all over a farmhouse near New Zealand's capital, Wellington, remained on Wednesday after the Civil Aviation Authority said it definitely did not come from a plane.
    An analysis of the muck that splattered the house in Takapu Valley on September 14 confirmed that it had no trace of the chemicals always put in an aircraft toilet, authority spokesperson Bill Sommer said.
    Farmer Shonnie Gordon - who raises sheep and cattle and knows something about the subject - is not convinced and is taking a sample to a laboratory specialising in human faeces for a second opinion.
    Since she spoke about the day that the UFO hit the house, there has been a spate of other reports of mystery droppings from around the country, with ducks and geese mainly blamed.
    The house of Mark Davis in Palmerston North, 14km north of Wellington, was hit on Sunday, according to Wednesday's Dominion Post newspaper.
    "I didn't hear a plane," he said, "but if it was a bird, it's a hell of a sick one. It was from one end of the house to the other."
    ©2003. All rights strictly reserved.
    http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=29&art_id=qw1064361960467B252&set_id=1

  • Massive Blackout hits Scandinavia
    BBC News
    9-23-3
    The Danish capital, Copenhagen, and parts of Sweden have been hit by massive power cuts.
    Around four million homes and businesses lost supplies at around 1240 local time (1040GMT). Engineers restored most power by late afternoon, but the exact cause of the cuts remained unclear.
    The problem stretched as far north as the Swedish capital, Stockholm, where the underground railway reportedly shut down for half an hour.
    The blackout follows similar incidents in London earlier this month, and in a huge swathe of North America in August. Sabotage was not suspected, police said, but some residents said their first thoughts were of a possible terrorist connection.
    "People were out everywhere and there was a sense of fear as to what this meant," said one emailer to BBC News Online.
    "Blackouts happen in the winter, but this made us wonder, since we have seen New York and London this year."
    Electricity officials said the power cuts started when a main transmission line connecting Sweden and Denmark was affected. Reports said a storm which swept through the area, bringing down trees, may have been a factor, but electricity officials said it was impossible to confirm whether the timing was a coincidence.
    At least two Swedish nuclear plants - Oskarshamn and Ringhals - appear to have then developed problems and had to shut down production units.
    Two million consumers in southern Sweden and 1.8m in Copenhagen were affected.
    Some people were trapped in trains in a tunnel linking the Danish islands of Funen and Seeland. Others were stuck in lifts for up to two hours.
    The Danish island of Bornholm was also hit.
    Traffic chaos
    Copenhagen airport and the Oeresund bridge and tunnel, linking the capital to Sweden, were reportedly closed, with scenes of traffic chaos in Copenhagen centre.
    Railway and underground train services ground to a halt. Officials said passengers on at least two new driverless underground trains were evacucated without incident.
    Reporters said hundreds of people emerged from shops in Copenhagen city centre to see what was happening, and used their mobile phones to contact their families. Hospitals switched to be using emergency generators.
    Nuclear power officials insisted that there was no safety threat from the shutdowns, which happened if there were big imbalances in the network and pressure suddenly fell.
    "The security systems there worked just as they should," said Anders Jorle, chief spokesman at the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate.
    © BBC MMIII
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3132332.stm

  • Report: Israel Spends $560 Million a Year on Jewish Settlements in Territories
    By Ravi Nessman Associated Press Writer
    Published: Sep 23, 2003
    JERUSALEM (AP) - The Israeli government spends at least $560 million a year on subsidies, infrastructure and education for 220,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to a report Tuesday in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
    The figure does not include military spending in those areas.
    Since capturing the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has spent at least $10.1 billion on settlements, Haaretz said.
    Successive Israeli governments have refused to disclose how much they spend on settlements. Haaretz said it compiled the figure after three months of research, including interviews with dozens of government officials and experts.
    The settlements are seen as one barrier to reaching a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinians say Israel uses the settlements to grab lands claimed for a Palestinian state.
    The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hit 220,000 last year, an increase of 5.7 percent from 2001, according to a report released Tuesday by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.
    The settlers' growth rate far outstripped the total Israeli growth rate of 1.6 percent and was more than double the growth rate in any region of Israel, according to the report.
    Nearly 5,000 of the 12,000 new settlers moved into the settlements from Israel or other countries. The remainder of the growth was attributed to new births.
    Palestinians say continued building in the settlements is proof Israel is not committed to peace.
    Spending on settlers and settlements also has become a tense issue in Israel, which is suffering from a deep economic crisis. Over the past three years, Israeli salaries have plummeted more than 10 percent and unemployment is approaching 11 percent.
    According to the Haaretz report, the amount of money spent on the settlements amounted to more than $2,200 per person.
    The money included spending on roads, housing, electricity, education and recently canceled tax breaks for settlers, according to the newspaper.
    The spending on the settlements equals more than 1 percent of the total Israeli budget of $48.7 billion.
    AP-ES-09-23-03 1455EDT

  • Largest Arctic Ice Shelf BreaksUp, Wiping Out Unique Ecosystem
    The Globe and Mail
    9-23-3
    The largest Arctic ice shelf is beginning to rip itself apart, 4,500 years after it first began forming.
    As it does so, it has begun to destroy a unique ecosystem that was starting to tell scientists both how life may have survived periods in which the Earth was frozen and how it might exist elsewhere in the solar system.
    Over the past two years, scientists at the University of Laval and the University of Alaska have begun to measure huge fissures tearing apart Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.
    The shelf, which at more than 440 square kilometres is roughly the size of the Island of Montreal, has now "snapped in two," said Warwick Vincent, a professor of ecology at Laval.
    According to images taken by Canada's Radarsat satellite, the fracture occurred sometime between 2000 and 2002. In a paper soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers report that the first casualty of the breakup was a unique lake. Scientists believe it had existed in back of the ice shelf since Ward Hunt first started forming off the northern flank of Ellesmere Island.
    The upper part of the lake was fresh water, and the lower part was salty sea water that had seeped under the ice shelf. Together they created an ecosystem in which freshwater and saltwater versions of the same small animals existed.
    The sudden draining of this lake through the new crack produced a flood into the Arctic Ocean of no small consequence. "My graduate student has estimated that the amount of water lost would have been equivalent to the water that flows over Niagara Falls in a month," Prof. Vincent said.
    The appearance of a rift, kilometres long and 80 metres wide in some places, is also causing scientists to rethink their notions of the effect of global warming, both human-induced and natural, on the Eastern Arctic.
    The area had been seen as an island of relative stability in a northern cold zone, despite notable warming noted in Siberia and Alaska.
    Going back over the historical temperature records, scientists see an accelerated increase in the air temperature over the now-dry lake bed since 1967.
    Some of the rise is related to a general warming since what is known as the Little Ice Age froze things on Earth in the middle of the 19th century. Higher temperatures since then have already melted about 90 per cent of the ice banks first reported in the area by early European explorers.
    However, given that the 1990s were the hottest decade on record, co-author Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska underscored the scientific consensus that the warming in Canada's North is likely to be the result of man-made processes as well.
    While only relatively small portions of the ice field have broken off and drifted out to sea, scientists believe that the entire field is now unglued from its moorings.
    The disappearance of the shelf would take with it a unique ecosystem. Each year on top of the ice, a bright orange patch appears. It is composed of a tangled mat of algae, bacteria and single-celled animals that are reborn after being frozen for most of the year.
    The ecosystem's existence has been used by proponents of the so-called Snowball Earth hypothesis to explain how life could have continued to exist when geological records suggest that much or all of the planet was icebound during periods 500 million to 700 million years ago.
    The resilience of the ice-field ecosystem also could explain how microscopic life might exist on very cold places such as Jupiter's moon Europa. Astronomers now believe underground water or "warm ice" might harbour what is called "extreme life."

  • Mutant Rats On Rampage In Central Asia
    Sep 20 2003 11:09AM
    Strange rats invade Kyrgyz region
    BISHKEK. Sept 20 (Interfax) - An unusual breed of rats is inflicting damage on Kyrgyzstan's Dzhalal-Abad region.
    The rats "are killing numerous farm birds, are damaging grape and corn crops, and have destroyed 14 hectares of grain in one of the districts. These rats can climb trees and are destroying apples, pears and other fruit. The rat invasion may also give rise to different epidemics," parliament member Dooronbek Sadyrbayev told Interfax.
    The rats frequently attack people and young children are especially vulnerable.
    Sanitary services are unable to deal with the situation. "The enormous amount of rats cannot be estimated," he said. The rats are not susceptible to typical poisons.
    An Uzbek specialist bred the species by crossing an ordinary rat with a muskrat, he said.
    The parliament members asked the government to resolve the problem.

  • Strong Quake Rocks Tokyo, Some Injuries
    Reuters
    Saturday, September 20, 2003; 1:01 AM
    TOKYO (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale jolted Tokyo and nearby areas on Saturday, injuring several people, but there were no reports of major damage.
    The quake, with its epicenter 50 miles below the surface in the Pacific Ocean east of Tokyo, occurred at 12:55 p.m. (11:55 p.m. EDT Friday), the Meteorological Agency said.
    No tsunami warning was issued, but fire officials quoted by Kyodo news agency said seven people were slightly injured when part of a temple wall collapsed in central Tokyo.
    The tremor did not seriously affect transportation.
    Japan sits atop the junction of at least three tectonic plates, immense slabs of the earth's crust whose gradual movements are thought to cause earthquakes, making it one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions.
    About 500 people were injured and a similar number of homes damaged or destroyed in a quake in July in Miyagi prefecture, 185 miles north of Tokyo.
    Memories are still vivid of the earthquake in the western city of Kobe that killed more than 6,400 people eight years ago.
    That quake measured 7.2 on the Richter scale.
    The Great Kanto earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923, measured 7.9 on the Richter scale and killed more than 140,000 people in Tokyo and the neighboring port city of Yokohama.
    Seismologists say it would be at least another 100 years before an earthquake of the same size and type strikes Tokyo, but warn that other devastating tremors could hit at any time.

  • Astronomer Predicts Major Earthquake for Japan, Other Experts Express Doubts
    By Associated Press
    posted: 03:40 pm ET
    15 September 2003
    TOKYO (AP) _ A Japanese researcher is causing a stir in Tokyo with a prediction based on his study of radio waves that a major destructive earthquake is highly likely to hit the city this week.
    Yoshio Kushida, a well-known self-taught astronomer who runs his own observatory just outside Tokyo, published on its Internet site his prediction that a quake with a magnitude of 7 or greater was likely to strike the metropolitan area on Tuesday or Wednesday.
    The prediction was soon picked up by a popular weekly magazine and a major daily. It has since been spread by word of mouth, prompting some of the more nervous residents of Japan's quake-prone capital to stock up on bottled water, candles and other disaster preparations.
    ``It's quite frightening,'' said Ichiro Makita, 48, a company employee who said he had heard about the prediction from a friend. ``I'm trying to avoid old buildings and have stocked up on emergency supplies like an emergency radio and lamp.'
    The earthquake research establishment has largely ignored the warning.
    Forecasting quakes is generally considered to be impossible with current technology, and Kushida's method of using anomalies in the VHF range of radio waves to predict the timing and intensity of tremors has not gained many believers in the scientific community.
    Yukio Misumi, a spokesman for the Central Meteorological Agency, said he was familiar with Kushida's prediction but added that the agency was not doing anything in particular in response to it.
    ``Our stance is that we are prepared for a magnitude-8 quake in Japan,'' he said. ``But presently, there is no scientific method or technology that would allow us to predict where or when a magnitude-7 might occur. We can't predict earthquakes.''
    ``We have nothing to specifically to say about Kushida's research,'' he added. ``He's simply expressing his own scientific opinion.''
    Kushida, however, is convinced he is on to something and has a duty to inform the public of the threat.
    Originally a self-taught astronomer, Kushida opened his private Yatsugatake Observatory in 1985, using radio waves to track passing meteors. He got his name on a pair of newly discovered comets before becoming interested in seismology after the devastating earthquake that hit the western city of Kobe in 1995.
    His theory: as pressure builds in the Earth's crust before an earthquake, tiny cracks and magma movements can affect charged particles in the atmosphere, and the resulting electromagnetic changes can be picked up by radio receivers.
    Extrapolating from past examples including the Kobe quake, which left more than 6,000 people dead, Kushida believes the waves indicate a shallow and powerful temblor is very likely to hit the Kanto plain, where Tokyo is located.
    ``It would be terrible not to warn people of a possible disaster in case a quake actually occurs,'' he said. ``If my prediction turns out to be a false alarm, I may face a lot of complaints and harassment and I may not be even able to continue my research. Even so, I thought I should warn every one of the possible danger.''
    Such warnings hit a sore nerve in Tokyo, which was ravaged by a quake and fire in 1923 that killed more than 120,000 people and which experts agree is overdue for another ``Big One.'' Still, some people said they'd rather be scared than unaware.
    ``The Japanese have a short-term memory when it comes to earthquakes,'' said Yoshio Aoyama, 64, a company employee. ``I think it's good to publish things like this periodically.''

  • Venus was possibly habitable for billions of years
    08 September 03
    NewScientist.com news service
    The hellish climate of Venus may have arisen far more recently than previously supposed, suggests new research. If so, pleasant Earth-like conditions probably persisted for two billion years after the planet's birth - plenty of time for life to have developed.
    Venus is virtually the same size as Earth and, on average, is our nearest neighbour. Today, its atmospheric temperatures are hot enough to melt lead and concentrated sulfuric acid continuously drizzles down from thick sulphurous clouds that completely block out the Sun.
    But the planet once had a climate similar to Earth's and vast oceans of water. Planetary scientists agree that period ended when Venus lost its water due to a runaway greenhouse effect, but the question is when.
    Until now, the best estimate, calculated 15 years ago by James Kasting, of the Pennsylvania State University, was four billion years ago - just 600 million years after the Solar System's birth.
    But new work by David Grinspoon, at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, suggests the momentous transition may have occurred much later. He points out the Kasting's estimate was just a lower limit on when the change happened, because it did not include the effect of clouds in the Venusian atmosphere.
    Clouds reflect sunlight back to space and therefore cool a planet's surface, and Grinspoon's preliminary calculations indicate that the effect can be dramatic - keeping the atmosphere 100 Kelvin cooler than without them.
    Although more detailed modeling remains to be done, Grinspoon says the difference could mean that oceans and pleasant temperatures may have persisted on Venus for at least two billion years.
    This also suggests that another global transformation on Venus about 700 million years ago, in which the whole planet's surface appears to have melted and reformed, may actually have been a continuation of the same greenhouse warming that dried out the planet.
    Once the water was lost, Grinspoon says, plate tectonics would have stopped completely, and with it the most efficient way for the planet to shed its internal heat. This could have led to a buildup that eventually caused the whole crust to melt and then reform.
    More generally, if this analysis is right, it means that the "habitable zone" for planets around other stars may be much wider than has been assumed, since Venus had been thought to be far outside it.
    Grinspoon presented his work at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Monterey, California on Saturday.

     

  • The Genetically Modified Bomb
    by Thom Hartmann
    Wednesday, September 10, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
    Imagine a bomb that only kills Caucasians with red hair. Or short people. Or Arabs. Or Chinese.
    Now imagine that this new bomb could be set off anywhere in the world, and that within a matter of days, weeks, or months it would kill every person on the planet who fits the bomb's profile, although the rest of us would be left standing. And the bomb could go off silently, without anybody realizing it had been released - or even where it was released - until its victims started dying in mass numbers.
    Who would imagine such a thing?
    Paul Wolfowitz, for one. William Kristol for another.
    And, history shows, when the men who define U.S. military policy from the shadows set their sights on something, it's worthy of our attention.
    I have brown hair and eyes, both determined by specific genes, and there are probably other markers deep within my DNA that would show a geneticist that most of my ancestors are Norwegian, Welsh, and English. While there's no one gene for race, there are numerous genes for the various components of what we call race - hair color and texture, skin and eye color, eye and nose shape, predispositions or immunities to disease like Sickle Cell Anemia or Tay-Sachs, and the like.
    When creating a genetic bomb to target specific groups, such genetic profiles are actually far subtler and more accurate than the coarse pseudo-category we call race. Among men named Cohen all over the world, for example, researchers have found a specific genetic profile tying them all back to a common ancestor. Another group with a common genetic profile are people with ADHD ("The Edison Gene"), who uniquely share common inherited variations in their dopamine-regulating genes regardless of their ostensible race, geography, or ethnicity.
    Thus, anybody who's part of a group with a shared genetic profile may be at risk in the future, suggest the authors of The Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century."
    The report notes that, "Much has been written in recent years about the need to transform the conventional armed forces of the United States to take advantage of the 'revolution in military affairs....'" They point out that our military requires a dramatic transformation, lest we lose our ability to fight future, unconventional wars. Some may be fought in cyberspace, others underwater or in outer space. And some even within our own bodies.
    Consider what would happen if there was a virus or bacteria that only infected a particular type of person, killing, disabling, or sterilizing only those of a particular genetic profile. Consider the political leverage a nation would have if they could credibly threaten the extinction of all people worldwide with almond-shaped eyes, or the sterilization of everybody with a gene that tracks them back to a common ancestor or region.
    Three years ago, Wolfowitz, Kristol, and their colleagues suggested this is something the Pentagon should be thinking about. Not just germ warfare, but gene warfare.
    And it's not limited just to warfare: Imagine how genetic terraforming could replace diplomacy, could even render the United Nations irrelevant if entire ethnic groups were wiped out or could be controlled by the threat of extinction. Or how it could change the face of politics if an organism got loose that killed off all the people of a particular minority who tend to vote for a particular political party.
    Genetically targeted weapons could change world politics forever, according to PNAC.
    "And," their report notes, "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
    Given that Kristol, Wolfowitz, and their conservative PNAC associates like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, and John Bolton have already brought us two of their early 1998 recommendations - the seizure of Iraq and a huge increase in defense spending - it's tempting to wonder if this is another of their other politically useful ideas being explored by the Pentagon.
    Or maybe we'd rather not know. At least not those of us with politically problematic relatives.
    Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is the award-winning, best-selling author of over a dozen books, and the host of a syndicated daily talk show that runs opposite Rush Limbaugh in cities from coast to coast. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent book (September 2003) is "The Edison Gene." This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached and the title is unchanged.
     
  • WORLD SET TO END AT 10pm ON MAY 19, 2031 ; New asteroid will wipe us out
    [People, The; London]
    AN asteroid hurtling towards the Earth could wipe out all human life within 30 years, The People can reveal.
    The 1.5 mile-wide lump of space rock is travelling at 21,000 mph - six miles a second.
    And it is set to cross Earth's orbit at 10pm on May 19, 2031. Science minister David Sainsbury stunned the House of Lords with news of the devastating discovery by astronomers.
    Asteroid expert Kevin Yates warned: "If it hit us it would vaporise at least a continent. The climate change would cause a nuclear winter which would potentially mean the extinction of the human race."
    Lord Sainsbury set out to allay fears, saying there is no danger of another recently-discovered asteroid hitting Earth in 2014. But he confirmed that a SECOND and more threatening rock is on the way. Scientists calculated its 2031 arrival date in the past 48 hours.
      Lib Dem space spokesman Lembit Opik said:"If it landed on Moscow it would incinerate everything from Bognor to the Bosphorous.
    "And if it came down in the sea it would set up a tidal wave 17 miles high."
    Mr Yates, of the asteroid monitoring system at Britain's National Space Centre, believes the risk of impact is slight. But even if it misses us it will only do so by ten hours, a blink in cosmic terms.
    The new asteroid, dubbed 2003/Q0104, was first spotted on August 31 by the Minor Planets Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is being tracked by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
    Lord Tanlaw, chairman of the Parliamentary Astronomy and Space Environment Group, said: "It is one of nature's missiles of mass destruction."
    Lord Sainsbury promised a scientific probe and admitted: "There is clearly a risk."

  • Who exposed whistleblower's wife?
    Julian Borger, Washington
    Saturday August 9, 2003
    The Guardian
    The FBI may launch an inquiry into whether the White House revealed the identity of a covert CIA official to punish her husband for blowing the whistle on President Bush for making misleading claims about the Iraqi nuclear programme, officials in Washington said yesterday.
    Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador and the last American official to meet Saddam Hussein, triggered a scandal on July 6 when he published an article saying that the White House knew in advance that the president's public statements about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa were not credible.
    Mr Wilson had been sent to Niger in 2002 by the CIA to investigate claims of attempted uranium purchases there, and reported back that they were "highly doubtful". Despite his report, President Bush said in his State of the Union address in January: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
    Mr Wilson said: "We spend billions of dollars on intelligence. But we end up putting something in the State of the Union address, something we got from another intelligence agency, something we cannot independently verify, in an area of Africa where the British have no on-the-ground presence."
    After Mr Wilson blew the whistle, the White House admitted the mistake but alleged that his report had never reached senior administration officials - a claim Mr Wilson said was false.
    A week after Mr Wilson went public, a conservative journalist, Bob Novak, published an article in which he wrote: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate."
    The report was controversial because it is against the law to reveal the identities of covert officials. If Ms Plame was investigating WMD deals, her cover would have been blown and her career ruined. Mr Wilson will not confirm or deny whether his wife is a CIA operative, but said yesterday: "Assuming it was true, the real victim in all this is American national security. Novak asserted that not only is my wife in the CIA but active in the WMD section. So senior administration officials have decided to take that particular asset out of the search for WMD in order to punish me."
    The administration has denied giving Novak any names, but Mr Wilson said he had been contacted by other reporters who had both been told about his wife by White House officials.
    The FBI said it would not comment on an ongoing investigation.

  • Vice President Cheney Personally Requested Investigation Of Iraq/Niger Connection.
    Cheney initiated the CIA's original inquiry into reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger. Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby admitted "the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report" during one of his regular intelligence briefings. [Time, 7/13/03]
    After Cheney's question, the CIA sent retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. Wilson reported in March 2002 to both the CIA and State Department that the reports were false. CIA sent a memo on Wilson's findings to the White House on March 9, 2002. [Time, 7/13/03]
    Based on decades of government experience, Amb. Wilson believed it was "standard operating procedure" for the CIA to inform Cheney's office of his findings. [Joseph Wilson Op-Ed, New York Times, 7/6/03]

  • The Ambassador Wilson Affair: The End of Karl Rove – And George Bush?
    by Al Martin
    (Sep 2) This is the hottest and most explosive story behind the scenes in Washington in terms of how it could affect the Bush administration.
    Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been turning up the heat in this situation. He revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.
    The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush’s so-called White House advisor. Ambassador Wilson identified him as Karl Roverer, with the umlaut over the “o.”
    According to reliable sources, as well as our own Al Martin Raw.com investigation, Karl Rove is, in fact, the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the gauleiter of Mecklenburg, who was also a partner and senior engineer of Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurbüro AG. They built Birchenau, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
    So Karl Rove has been identified as the leaker responsible for the deaths of more than 70 CIA assets overseas (See previous story “Will the Real Chemical Ali Please Stand Up? The Curious Case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson)
    When Ambassador Wilson was asked how he knew it was Rove, he had documents in his possession identifying Rove as the leaker from a secret investigation of the State Department’s Internal; Security Unit. It was a from a small clique, four Clinton holdovers in that department of the State Department that were sympathetic to what had happened to Wilson.
    These investigations could not have possibly been made without at least the tacit acquiescence of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
    Wilson has announced that he will have his private attorneys petition the Department of Justice demanding that Roverer a/k/a Karl Rove be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identity Protection Act . This law specifically supposed to prevent what has happened in this case and that is the Bush administration attempting to retaliate against a senior government official who tells the truth about that administration by revealing the identities of intelligence members within their own families.
    This is a law that was specifically designed to prevent this from happening. It is a law that was proffered by the Democrats in 1982 that the Republicans fought and could not defeat. The law carries an automatic mandatory 10 years to life imprisonment as punishment.
    And where would Rove go? Karl Rove, it should be noted, is a dual citizen of the United States and Germany. Because of his position he has special diplomatic status. The idea is that if its absolutely necessary he could go to Switzerland where he couldn’t be extradited.
    The law specifically states in this case (and this depends on how much Secretary of State Colin Powell is prepared to get involved, if he signs a formal complaint from the State Department, then the Attorney General has no choice but to prosecute. He is required to prosecute, even if he doesn’t want to do so.
    This is very explosive and what makes it so explosive is that this Intelligence Identity Act, if it can be proved, and Rove can be successfully prosecuted and if Rove reveals that the president George Bush told him to institute this leak, then the President's automatic shield of immunity is removed and the president himself can be prosecuted for murder if any deaths of any US intelligence agents or assets resulted from the leak. This is the only legal statute that has this provision.
    The Bush Administration is exerting enormous pressure on Colin Powell because he is the real linchpin. They are exerting pressure on him NOT to proceed to file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.
    Wilson’s problem is that he has no greater legal standing than that of a private citizen. The Department of Justice, unbeknownst to anybody, has had a lot of communications with Wilson’s attorney and they’re claiming that Wilson has no special status, that he's just an everyday citizen, so that any demand he would make for prosecution would carry no more weight than a private citizen or OFU.
    (OFU is George Bush Senior’s term to describe the average American citizen. It stands for “One Fodder Unit.”)
    Wilson is saying, however, that when Rove leaked this out, he was still formally employed by the State Department. Wilson, it should be remembered, was the former ambassador during the Clinton Regime, was formally rehired, and he received a paycheck from the Department of State. When these leaks took place he still had another three weeks left on his contract. Therefore he was still a United States Ambassador and that apparently is also a key legal point.
    When this goes before the US Court of Appeals in Washington and if the court agrees that Wilson was a formal ambassador at the time, then Colin Powell can not refuse to formally petition the Department of Justice for the prosecution of Karl Rove and to open an investigation into the president’s and vice president’s role in the affair.
    Was Rove really the source of the leak? The investigation held thus far by the State Department’s Internal Security (ISD) has stated that Rove did indeed leak the information out about the Ambassador’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Wilson, to the Washington Post. Apparently they have an affidavit from the reporter he leaked it to.
    The way the Bush Regime is trying to quash it is to slow it way down by exerting so much pressure against Pro-Bush Media. Please note that you have not heard one word about this on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News And not one word about this on ABC, CBS, or NBC.
    If there is no public attention, there will be no steam behind it. Some of the congressmen are trying to push this into higher quarters. They’re trying to get Howard Dean to talk about it since he’s getting so much press coverage
    It’s been said that Dean is himself frightened to start talking about it because it would diminish the press coverage he’s been getting. The Bush Administration has let it be known to the Democratic National Committee that any Democrat who tries to push this will find press coverage severely limited.
    When the Democratic presidential selection process filters out (since there are now nine declared Democrats) and when there is one Democrat that everyone is behind, who’s going to be the contender, then they won’t be so frightened.
    But this is a story, which should be more widely known, since the treatment of Ambassador Wilson and his family (not to mention the US intelligence assets who were liquidated overseas) is certainly one of the most egregious abuses of power yet perpetrated by the Bush administration.

  • Discovering WMD
    Robert Novak (archive)
    townhall.com
    August 9, 2003
    WASHINGTON -- Former international weapons inspector David Kay, now seeking Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for the Pentagon, has privately reported successes that are planned to be revealed to the public in mid-September.

    Kay has told his superiors he has found substantial evidence of biological weapons in Iraq, plus considerable missile development. He has been less successful in locating chemical weapons, and has not yet begun a substantial effort to locate progress toward nuclear arms.
    Senior officials in the Bush administration believe Kay's weapons discoveries should have been revealed as they were made. However, a decision, approved by President Bush, was made to wait until more was discovered and then announce it -- probably in September.

  • 'Human shield' faces $10,000 fine
    A Sarasota peace activist is penalized for violating U.S. law by entering Iraq
    BY LAUREN GLENN
    heraldtribune.com
    SARASOTA -- A Sarasota woman who served as a "human shield" during the war in Iraq faces thousands of dollars in civil penalties.
    According to a letter dated March 20 from the federal Department of the Treasury, Faith Fippinger broke the law by crossing the Iraqi border -- a violation of U.S. sanctions that prohibit American citizens from engaging in "virtually all direct or indirect commercial, financial or trade transactions with Iraq."
    Fippinger, who returned home on May 4, learned of the letter from her brother, who kept track of her mail while she was overseas. Once she arrived in the United States, she had 20 days to respond, which she did.
    Now, Fippinger, 62, owes the United States at least $10,000, which is $10,000 more than she says she will pay.
    In a letter Fippinger mailed to the government in May, she said she would not pay a fine.
    "If it comes to fines or imprisonment, please be aware that I will not contribute money to the United States government to continue the build-up of its arsenal of weapons," Fippinger wrote in her response to the charges. She said she has no intention of paying. "Therefore, perhaps the alternative should be considered."
    The alternative could be as much as 12 years in prison.
    Fippinger said the $10,000 was a settlement offered to her by the Treasury Department as a quicker alternative to a drawn-out legal battle that could cost her up to $1 million.
    If Fippinger does not pay, the fine may increase, and the money will be drawn from her retirement paycheck, her Social Security check or any of her assets.
    She says she doesn't have much.
    "She was (in Iraq) in violation of U.S. sanctions," said Taylor Griffin, a Treasury Department spokesman. "That's what happens."
    The letter, signed by David Harmon, chief of the enforcement division of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, demanded that Fippinger include in her response the purposes and dates of her time in Iraq, along with a description of any financial transactions she made.
    The letter also asked for the name of any travel agent who arranged the trip, any U.S. goods she might have donated and any Iraqi goods she might have brought home.
    "They're saying that I, as a human shield, exported services to Iraq by going over there," Fippinger said Friday.
    In her response, Fippinger wrote that the only money she spent was on food and emergency supplies.
    She and others from 30 countries spread out through Iraq in a futile effort to prevent American bombing of the country. She spent about three months there, including time at an oil refinery. Only about 20 of nearly 300 "human shields" were Americans, she said.
    They all face the same charges as Fippinger.
    "I thought it was one of my friends pulling a joke on me," said one of them, Ryan Clancey of Milwaukee on Friday.
    He said the Treasury Department didn't promise that the case would be closed if he paid the $10,000.
    "They use the word settlement as in 'perhaps we won't punish you,'" he said.
    The Treasury Department employee who contacted Clancey told him that three others were facing possible criminal charges, but would not say who they were or whether Clancey would join their ranks.
    Griffin said Fippinger and the others also violated a ban against travel to Iraq.
    "I was aware I was violating a travel ban," Clancey said. "But I needed to meet the people we were going to bomb and kill."
    So far, arguments against the penalties have proven fruitless.
    "When you break the law, you can expect to get a fine," Griffin said. "The Bush administration is committed to the full and fair enforcement of the law."
    August 09. 2003 7:19AM
    heraldtribune.com

  • Horrifying US Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad
    Exclusive By Bill Dash
    c. 2003 All Rights Reserved
    8-25-03
    A nightmarish US super weapon reportedly was employed by American ground forces during chaotic street fighting in Baghdad. The secret tank-mounted weapon was witnessed in all its frightening power by Majid al-Ghazali, a seasoned Iraqi infantryman who described the device and its gruesome effects as unlike anything he had ever encountered in his lengthy military service. The disturbing revelation is yet another piece of cinematic evidence brought back from postwar Iraq by intrepid filmmaker Patrick Dillon.
    In the film, al-Ghazali, whose english is less than fluent, describes the weapon as reminiscent of a flame thrower, only immensely more powerful. It is unclear what principle the weapon is based on. Searching for a description, al-Ghazali said it appeared to be shooting concentrated lightning bolts rather than just ordinary flames. Drawing on his many years as a professional engineer, al-Ghazali speculates that radiation of some kind probably figures into the weapon's hideous capabilities. Like all men in Saddam's Iraq, al-Ghazali was compelled to serve in the Iraqi equivalent of the Army National Guard and fought in three wars over the past thirty-odd years. Via email, he told me he has seen virtually every type of conventional weapon employed in battle, and is well acquainted with their effects on people and machines, but nothing in his extensive combat experience prepared him for the shock of what he saw in Baghdad on April 12th.
    On that date, al-Ghazali and his family sheltered in their house as a fierce street battle erupted in his neighborhood. In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging "like a wet rag" as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device.
    In a city littered everywhere with burned-out civilian and military vehicles, US forces were abnormally scrupulous about immediately detailing bulldozers and shovel crews to the job of burying the grim wreckage. Nevertheless, telltale remnants remained as Dillon found when al-Ghazali later took him to the site. Dillon said they easily uncovered large puddles of resolidified metal and mounds of weird fibrous material that, al-Ghazali explained, were all that remained of the vehicles' tires. Dillon, who accumulated plenty of battlefield experience as a medic in Viet-Nam, and has since covered a number of wars from Somalia to Kosovo, told me that he has witnessed every kind of conventional ordnance that can be used on humans and vehicles. " I've seen a freaking smorgasbord of destruction in my life," he said, "flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what's in store for the 21st century."
    For Majid al-Ghazali, images of the terrifying weapon and its victims haunt his every day. In addition to his work as an engineer, he is also a highly accomplished classical violinist, occupying the first chair in the Baghdad Symphony. He is widely acknowledged as one of the preeminent violinists in the Middle East. Besides his family, one of his greatest joys is teaching at Baghdad's premier music conservatory. Unfortunately, the conservatory was utterly destroyed. Yet somehow, despite the war's horrors and its seemingly endless privations, he manages to maintain a remarkably hopeful outlook. He recently informed me that the Baghdad Symphony continues to exist and has been invited to perform in the United States in December.

  • US Tried To Plant Iraq WMDs - And Failed
    Daily Times Monitor - Pakistan
    8-13-3
    According to a stunning report posted by a retired Navy Lt Commander and 28-year veteran of the Defense Department (DoD), the Bush administration's assurance about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was based on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to "plant" WMDs inside the country. Nelda Rogers, the Pentagon whistleblower, claims the plan failed when the secret mission was mistakenly taken out by "friendly fire", the Environmentalists Against War report.
    Nelda Rogers is a 28-year veteran debriefer for the DoD. She has become so concerned for her safety that she decided to tell the story about this latest CIA-military fiasco in Iraq. According to Al Martin Raw.com, "Ms Rogers is number two in the chain of command within this DoD special intelligence office. This is a ten-person debriefing unit within the central debriefing office for the Department of Defense."
    The information that is being leaked out is information "obtained while she was in Germany heading up the debriefing of returning service personnel, involved in intelligence work in Iraq for the DoD and/or the CIA. "According to Ms Rogers, there was a covert military operation that took place both preceding and during the hostilities in Iraq," reports Al Martin Raw.com, an online subscriber-based news/analysis service which provides "Political, Economic and Financial Intelligence".
    Al Martin is a retired Lt Commander (US Navy), the author of a memoir called "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider," and is considered one of America's foremost experts on corporate and government fraud. Ms Rogers reports that this particular covert operation team was manned by former military personnel and "the unit was paid through the Department of Agriculture in order to hide it, which is also very commonplace".
    According to Al Martin Raw.com, "the Agriculture Department has often been used as a paymaster on behalf of the CIA, DIA, NSA and others". According to the Al Martin Raw.com story, another aspect of Ms Rogers' report concerns a covert operation which was to locate the assets of Saddam Hussein and his family, including cash, gold bullion, jewelry and assorted valuable antiquities. The problem became evident when "the operation in Iraq involved 100 people, all of whom apparently are now dead, having succumbed to so-called 'friendly fire'. The scope of this operation included the penetration of the Central Bank of Iraq, other large commercial banks in Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum and certain presidential palaces where monies and bullion were secreted."
    "They identified about $2 billion in cash, another $150 million in Euros, in physical banknotes, and about another $100 million in sundry foreign currencies ranging from Yen to British Pounds," reports Al Martin.
    "These people died, mostly in the same place in Baghdad, supposedly from a stray cruise missile or a combination of missiles and bombs that went astray," Martin continues. "There were supposedly 76 who died there and the other 24 died through a variety of 'friendly fire', 'mistaken identity' and some of them-their whereabouts are simply unknown." Ms Rogers' story sounds like an updated 21st-century version of Treasure Island meets Ali Baba and the Bush Cabal Thieves, writes Martin.
    "This was a contingent of CIA/ DoD operatives, but it was really the CIA that bungled it," Ms Rogers said. "They were relying on the CIA's ability to organise an effort to seize these assets and to be able to extract these assets because the CIA claimed it had resources on the ground within the Iraqi army and the Iraqi government who had been paid. That turned out to be completely bogus. As usual."
    "CIA people were supposed to be handling it," Martin continues. "They had a special 'black' aircraft to fly it out. But none of that happened because the regular US Army showed up, stumbled onto it and everyone involved had to scramble. These new Iraqi "asset seizures" go directly to the New US Ruling Junta. The US Viceroy in Iraq Paul Bremer is reportedly drinking Saddam's $2000 a bottle Napoleon-era brandy, smoking his expensive Davidoff cigars and he has even furnished his office with Saddam's Napoleon-era furniture.
    http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-8-2003_pg1_9

  • The Lone Gunmen was a Fox spin-off of the X-files and in July 2001 aired an episode where a plane is electronically hijacked by a secret government cabal who try to crash it into the World Trade Center to get martial law, start wars and increase weapons sales.

  • Secret CIA operation to electronically remove Iraqi Central Bank Reserves before the Start of War:
    CIA Accused Of Bank Heist
    by Gordon Thomas
    American Free Press, August 2003
    Shortly before U.S. forces began streaming across the Iraqi border, commencing Persian Gulf War II, the CIA and the Department of Defense, with a little help from Israel and some Europeans, pulled off a massive bank heist in Iraq to the tune of several billion dollars.
    The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) are accused by International Currency Review, the London-based journal, of mounting a joint ultra-secret operation to electronically remove an estimated $10 billion out of the Iraqi Central Bank hours before the start of Persian Gulf War II. The whereabouts of the money is not known.
    “We believe it is in a secret CIA fund which will be used to mount further special services operations, such as tracking down Saddam Hussein,” said the Review’s publisher, Christopher Story.
    Story is a former financial advisor to Lady Thatcher when she was Britain’s prime minister. In the past 10 years, he has testified before several congressional committees dealing with financial scandals.
    DIA coordinates all intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is headquartered in the Pentagon.
    The report is titled “The Great Robbery of the Central Bank of Iraq.” It has been sent to finance ministers of leading nations, the World Bank, the Bank of England and heads of all other major banks.
    The report is bound to cause huge embarrassment to President Bush after he signed an executive order on March 23, ordering a worldwide hunt for the hidden assets of Saddam Hussein and his family.
    The Review claims that using skilled hackers recruited by the DIA and key Iraqi bank officials who had been bribed to provide secret access codes to the Central Bank’s accounts for Saddam Hussein and his family, the money was transferred out of the bank in a high-tech operation.
    According to the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative agency of Congress, Saddam was estimated to have accumulated “$6.6 billion between 1997 and 2000 from illegal oil smuggling and from illicit deals connected with the United Nations oil for food program.”
    But a substantial portion of that money may have been lifted by the secret CIA/DIA operation.
    The operation, claims the Review, was masterminded by the CIA/DIA out of a military facility, Redstone Arsenal, in Alabama. It is the base for U.S. Special Ser vices.
    “The money was laundered through a number of CIA controlled accounts, including some held in the Discount Bank of Israel, Credit Suisse in Switzerland and the Dresdner Bank in Germany,” said Story.
    He confirmed that Germany’s secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is checking with the major German banks on electronic transfers, which could match the $10 billion.
    The Review states in its 25-page report that it had questioned a key member of the operation. She is identified as “Nelda Rogers, a debriefing officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
    “She was in Germany last year when American intelligence officials were devising covert operations ahead of the long-planned conflict. She has revealed that a covert operation targeting the Central Bank of Iraq took place prior to and during the war. The operatives involved were military ‘black operations’ personnel brought into service for this purpose,” said Story.
    The Review claims that Rogers and a team of ten DIA operatives were financed through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They were supported by CIA agents in Iraq.
    “In all, 100 people were involved in the operation,” says the report. “The Department of Agriculture has been consistently used to hide payments for U.S. covert operations,” claimed Story, whose headquarters are close to Whitehall.
    The Review states: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture is used as a paymaster for certain DIA ‘black operations’ because it has traditionally remained unscrutinized.”
    “Like the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury’s secret Exchange Stabilization Fund, the Department of Agriculture is yet another federal agency which benefits from a special exemption from rigorous auditing by the General Accounting Office.”
    The Review also states it has testimony from Rogers that the operation was designed to “purloin the Iraq Central Bank’s assets ahead of the arrival of U.S. troops in Baghdad. This suggests that the operation was designed for a nefarious purpose, rather than to help use it for the rebuilding of Iraq.”
    After interviewing Rogers and “a number of U.S. intelligence operatives,” Story confirmed he received three warnings to stop his investigation.
    “I was told that 19 people are very dead as a result of trying to cover what you are exposing,” Story wrote in an editorial in the Review.
    The Review costs $475 a copy and is one of a small group of titles that Story publishes on financial intelligence for the world banking community.

  • Arctic Ice Shrinking Due To Global Warming Could Be Boon to Oil Industry
    8-13-3
    OSLO (Reuters) -- Global warming will melt most of the Arctic icecap in summertime by the end of the century, a report showed Wednesday.
    The three-year international study indicated that ice around the North Pole had shrunk by 7.4 percent in the past 25 years with a record small summer coverage in September 2002.
    "The summer ice cover in the Arctic may be reduced by 80 percent at the end of the 21st century," said Norwegian Professor Ola Johannessen, the main author of the report funded by the European Commission.
    The Arctic Barents Sea north of Russia and Norway could be free of ice even in winter by the end of the century, said Johannesssen, who works at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.
    "This will make it easier to explore for oil, it could open the Northern Sea Route (between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans)," he said of the report, dubbed the Arctic Ice Cover Simulation Experiment.
    Moscow and Norway reckon the Barents Sea could be a promising new area for oil and gas. The Northern Sea passage could save shippers about 10 days on a trip from Japan to Europe compared to traveling through the Suez Canal.
    Johannessen said that the report, published on the Internet ahead of peer review, also indicated that a recent thinning of the polar icecap was linked to human emissions of gases like carbon dioxide blamed for blanketing the planet.
    But the study showed a thinning of the icecap from 1920-1940 was caused by natural climate fluctuations, such as ocean currents and winds, rather than by a build-up of greenhouse gases.
    Johannessen said the new survey added to evidence of a gradual thinning of the icecap and gave firmer signs that human emissions, such as exhausts from cars and factories, were mainly to blame.
    Climate experts say that polar areas are heating up more than other regions.

  • Bush Says CO2 Is Not A Pollutant
    The Independent - UK
    8-31-03
    LOS ANGELES -- The Bush administration has decreed that carbon dioxide from industrial emissions - the main cause of global warming - is not a pollutant.
    The decision by the Environmental Protection Agency - announced with minimal fanfare on the eve of the Labor Day weekend - reverses the stance taken under President Clinton and allows industry to increase emissions with impunity.
    It is also part of a pattern of casting doubt on scientific evidence, going back to the US's rejection of the Kyoto Protocols in 2001. Earlier this year, the Bush administration excised a 28-page section on climate change from an EPA report. It also ignored a report by the US Academy of Sciences that argued that the evidence of climate change could not be ignored.
    "Saying that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming is like refusing to say smoking causes lung cancer," said Melissa Carey, a climate change expert with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.
    Environmental groups are now considering suing the EPA to force the regulation of greenhouse gases.
    The Bush administration appears to be guided by a leaked memo by the political consultant Frank Luntz, which advised: "Should the public believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

  • Israeli Sleeper Agents Mobilizing for 9-11 Anniversary
    Israel is secretly mobilizing its sleeper agents in the United States in the run-up to the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
    Exclusive to American Free Press
    By Gordon Thomas
    In an unprecedented move, Israel has secretly mobilized its estimated 15,000 sleeper agents —known as sayanim—across America. For the past month, in the utmost secrecy, they have been briefed by former Mossad operations director, Raphael (Rafi) Eitan, on how to update the defense systems of synagogues, Jewish religious schools, Jewish banks, and other Jewish-owned institutions.
    Many of the sayanim—the name comes from the Hebrew “to help”—have received weapons training during their military service. Others have worked in U.S. military intelligence. A number are currently employed by police forces across the country.
    “While their allegiance to their birth country cannot be doubted, each sayan recognizes a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel and a need to help protect it from its enemies,” Meir Amit, a former Mossad chief, has said. He created the secret force of sayanim.
    Known as Israel’s “invisible army,” all its members are vetted by professional Mossad intelligence officers, called katsas, before being recruited.
    Sayanim reported that the FBI has identified 240 individuals living in the United States—mostly Saudis and Syrians—who are openly sympathetic to al Qaeda.
    “We have no hard evidence they are involved in the preparation of an attack to mark the second anniversary of Sept. 11,” an FBI source said. “Our policy is to keep close surveillance on them and move in at the first sign of an attack being planned.”
    This wait-and-see policy has angered Israel’s Mossad, which insists an attack is being planned. Israeli intelligence had given a similar warning before Sept. 11, 2001, which was dismissed as being “too vague” by both the CIA and FBI.
    To protect its massive multiple interests in the United States, Israel has decided to act alone. It will be seen by Homeland Security and the FBI as a vote of no confidence in their ability to protect Jewish interests.
    The information of a possible attack came from two U.S.-based katsas (Mossad agents). Each made a similar report to Mossad chief, Meir Dagan. Both reports stated al Qaeda terrorists in Canada are preparing to launch an attack in the United States. No date or target was provided.
    The decision to send Eitan—the Mossad spy chief who persuaded Jonathan Pollard to betray all of America’s most important defense secrets to Israel—was made by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
    Eitan is traveling on an Israeli diplomatic passport throughout the United States—and requests to question him about his activities have been rejected.
    In order to avoid creating a political problem with Israel, FBI Director Robert Mueller is said to have been ordered by Attorney General John Ashcroft not to question Eitan.
    A high-level administration source said: “In the end, we are both on the same side. We need to keep Sharon reading the road map to peace—even if it is in tatters right now.”
    On a recent fishing trip to Ireland, Mueller made plain his feelings along the banks of one of Ireland’s finest salmon rivers. A source close to Mueller said: “Once more the Israelis are trying to run their own show. Eitan appears to have mobilized a private army within the United States which will ultimately only be answerable to Israel.”
    ANOTHER PROMIS
    In a separate but related incident, another former Mossad agent, Juval Aviv, has claimed in an email that Eitan is using the latest version of Promis—the sophisticated software that can track terrorists—to help to train sayanim.
    The software was originally stolen by Eitan from a specialist Washington computer company, Inslaw. Since then, Inslaw has developed several even more sophisticated versions of the program.
    Details are a closely guarded secret at Inslaw’s offices. But it is known that at least one major business corporation in Columbus, Ohio—where Eitan has set up base—uses a version of Promis.
    In his email, sent at 9:19 a.m. on Aug. 22 to Inslaw boss, Bill Hamilton, Aviv—who is president of the New York-based Interfor, an international private security agency staffed with former intelligence officers—makes an astonishing claim:
    The new version of Promis was tested in Ohio by you-know-who, and he caused the blackout last weekend.
    It was a test that was not meant to cause that much devastating damage, but because their infrastructure is so old and vulnerable, it went down without being able to correct itself. That is how we got the blackout in 2003.
    Mr. X is bragging about it and is quite impressed with Promis’s new capabilities.
    “You-know-who” and “Mr. X” refer to Eitan.
    Attempts to contact Aviv to discuss his extraordinary claim have failed. Aviv refused to take calls at his New York offices from where he runs his worldwide operations.
    Aviv has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship and claims that, as well as working for Mossad, he also led an Israeli army elite commando/intelligence unit. He worked in Mossad at the same time Eitan was its director of operations.
    Intelligence sources in Washington are puzzled why Aviv should have linked Eitan to the blackout. But the FBI is likely to question Aviv on his claims—unless they are once more warned off.
    Meanwhile, Eitan’s sayanim are fully mobilized.
    In an interview, Meir Amit has said: “Sayanim fulfill many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, lets his handler know if any suspicious person has rented a car. A realtor sayan provides similar information on anyone seeking accommodations.
    “Sayanim also collect technical data and all kinds of overt intelligence—a rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a story overheard at a dinner party. Without its sayanim Mossad could not operate,” claimed Amit.
    Between now and Sept. 11, Israel’s secret army will be reporting to Eitan under the nose of the FBI agents who continue to monitor his activities—but can do nothing to learn more by questioning the spymaster. Perhaps they are depending on their outmoded version of the Promis software to provide the answers.

  • ADL criticizes law denying citizenship to Palestinians who marry Israelis
    w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m
    Tuesday, August 26, 2003 Av 28, 5763
    By Nathan Guttman, Yair Ettinger and Sharon Sadeh
    A major American Jewish organization has publicly come out against the new Knesset law preventing Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from obtaining Israeli citizenship or residency permits in Israel.
    In an unusual step, the influential Anti-Defamation League also called on the Knesset to review the law when it expires next year.
    In a statement released yesterday, Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said: "We wish such a law was not necessary, but understand that Israel has vital security concerns." He added: "We hope the Knesset will review this law when it expires in a year and explore other methods to ensure Israel's security needs."
    Despite its careful wording and the consideration of Israel's security needs, the ADL's statement is considered something of an anomaly since the American Jewish organizations normally go to great lengths to stand behind Israel's official positions. The ADL monitors and tries to prevent outbreaks of anti-Semitism as well as racism, xenophobia and violations of human rights worldwide.
    The statement comes on the heels of a State Department announcement that it will examine whether the new legislation is consistent with the administration's position on preventing discrimination.
    EU expresses opposition
    Opposition to the amended law passed by the Knesset last week has also been voiced by the European Union, which hinted that the legislation could preclude the possibility of Israel's joining the Wider Europe initiative.
    EU Ambassador to Israel Giancarlo Chevellard described the legislation as "establishing a discriminatory regime to the detriment of Palestinians in the highly sensitive area of family rights."
    The EU will examine whether the legislation is compatible with international law and basic standards of human rights, Chevellard said, adding that under the association agreement signed between Israel and the EU, "Israeli respect for human rights constitutes an essential element of Israel's relationship with the EU."
    He said that the closer cooperation with Europe, being discussed in the framework of the Wider Europe initiative, "presupposes improved respect for human rights by Israel, as by any other EU partner."
    Over the past few days, the legislation has come under heavy criticism in the European media and has been condemned by international human rights organizations.
    Israel's High Court of Justice will hear a petition against the legislation submitted Sunday by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.


  • Federal Court Restricts Global Deployment Of Navy Sonar
    Natural Resources Defense Council
    8-27-03
    http://www.nrdc.org
    Conservation Groups Say Ruling Protects Whales And Other Marine Life From Injury And Death
    SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge ruled today that the Navy's plan to deploy a new high-intensity sonar system violates numerous federal environmental laws and could endanger whales, porpoises and fish. In a 73-page opinion, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte barred the Navy's planned around-the-world deployment and ordered the Navy to reduce the system's potential harm to marine mammals and fish by negotiating limits on its use with conservation groups who had sued over its deployment.
    The sonar system, known as Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active sonar (or LFA), relies on extremely loud, low-frequency sound to detect submarines at great distances. According to the Navy's own studies, LFA generates sounds up to 140 decibels even more than 300 miles away from the sonar source. Many scientists believe that blasting such intense sounds over large expanses of the ocean could harm entire populations of whales, porpoises and fish. During testing off the California coast, noise from a single LFA system was detected across the breadth of the North Pacific Ocean.
    "Today's ruling is a reprieve not just for whales, porpoises, and fish, but ultimately for all of us who depend for our survival on healthy oceans," said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC, the lead plaintiff and counsel in the case. "The decision recognizes that both national security and environmental protection are essential. It recognizes that during peacetime, even the military must comply with our environmental laws, and it rejects the blank-check permit that would have allowed the Navy to operate LFA sonar virtually anywhere in the world."
    In her ruling, Judge Laporte found that a permit issued to the Navy by the National Marine Fisheries Service to deploy LFA sonar violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because it did not adequately assess or take steps to mitigate the risks posed by the system to marine mammals and fish.
    Judge Laporte found that, "endangered species, including whales, listed salmon and sea turtles will be in LFA sonar's path. There is little margin for error without threatening their survival?Absent an injunction, the marine environment that supports the existence of these species will be irreparably harmed."
    In October, Judge Laporte granted a request by conservation groups for a temporary injunction to restrict deployment under the permit. Today's ruling orders the Navy to negotiate with NRDC and its co-plaintiffs on terms of a permanent injunction that would limit where, when and how the Navy can use LFA for testing and training. The injunction wouldn't prevent the Navy from using the system during war or "heightened threat conditions," as determined by the military.
    Scientists have been increasingly alarmed in recent years about undersea noise pollution from high-intensity active sonar systems, which have been shown to harm and even kill whales and other marine life.
    The mass stranding of multiple whale species in the Bahamas in March 2000 and the simultaneous disappearance of the region's entire population of beaked whales intensified these concerns. A federal investigation identified testing of a U.S. Navy mid-frequency active sonar system as the cause. Last September, mass strandings occurred in the Canary Islands as a result of military sonar, and in the Gulf of California as the likely result of an acoustic geophysical survey using extremely loud air guns.
    Most recently, more than a dozen harbor porpoises were found dead on the beach near the San Juan Islands soon after the Navy tested active sonar in the Haro Strait in May. Videotape shows a pod of orca whales in the foreground behaving erratically as the Shoup, a U.S. Navy vessel, emits loud sonar blasts. Recent tests on one of the harbor porpoises revealed injuries consistent with acoustic trauma.
    "The science is clear -- intense active sonar can kill whales, porpoises and fish," said Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist with the Humane Society of the United States, one of the co-plaintiffs. "The Navy must find ways to test and train with the LFA system that do not needlessly damage marine life."
    "The public has a strong interesting in minimizing, as much as possible, any disruption or injury to these creatures from exposure to the extremely loud and far-traveling naval sonar system," Judge Laporte wrote in her opinion. "Public concern has been heightened by incidents where exposure to another kind of Navy sonar has led to lethal strandings of whales on the beach, as in the Bahamas in 2000."
    "The court properly ruled that the permit to deploy the LFA system violates federal law," said Andrew Sabey, a partner with the international firm of Morrison & Foerster, which is representing the plaintiffs NRDC, the Humane Society, the League for Coastal Protection, the Cetacean Society International, and the Ocean Futures Society and its president, Jean-Michel Cousteau.
    "The marine environment is an invaluable resource that we all must share," said Jean-Michel Cousteau. "I am very pleased that good sense has prevailed. The court has taken an extremely valuable step to protect a part of our life support system from destruction."
    - The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 550,000 members nationwide, served from offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  • Toxic algae suspected in whale death.
    Red tide's poison may have killed a dozen humpbacks in North Atlantic.
    4 August 2003
    nature.com
    Whales eat fish that eat poisonous algae.
    A deadly alga is the leading suspect in the mass death of humpback whales around 150 miles off Cape Cod, say marine experts.
    Carcass sightings suggest that at least 12 whales, mostly humpbacks, have died in the Georges Bank area, making it one of the worst known mass fatalities. "It's really quite disturbing," says whale biologist Phillip Clapham of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
    A red tide of the toxic algae Alexandrium fundyense is the most likely culprit. The algae's poison, saxitoxin, killed 14 whales in the same area in 1987. Saxitoxin can accumulate in mackerel which whales eat .
    Unusual currents or weather may have carried the algae to Georges Bank from the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, where they bloom each summer. The algal toxin also poisons people when it gets into mussels and clams.
    Investigators are currently analysing the whales' blood, urine and skin for traces of the poison - results are expected later this week. Only one of the dead whales has obvious wounds from fishing tackle or ships.
    There is a slim chance that the animals died after acoustic damage caused by navy sonar, says Michael Moore of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who is involved in the investigation. Until a fresher carcass than the ones already found is towed in and dissected, "we can't rule in or out those events", he says.
    Mass whale die-offs - at least those discovered - are rare. But blooms of other harmful algae routinely kill dolphins, sea lions and otters off the southern Californian coast and elsewhere.
    Right turn?
    The alarm was first raised on 3 July, when researchers found three dead humpbacks in Georges Bay during a routine aerial survey. The normal head-count is one whale every few weeks. "It was enough to make us concerned," says Clapham.
    Since we don't know the pathway, we don't know what else to worry about
    Don Anderson
    Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
    The region's humpback population is thriving and will probably survive the losses. But the deaths raise fears that the endangered Northern Atlantic right whale population - just 320 animals - might also be affected. These mammals feed in the Gulf of Maine during summer.
    Right whales might escape acute poison buildups because they eat plankton rather than fish. "There is no indication they've been affected so far," says Jerry Conway, marine mammal adviser to the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.


  • Energy Chief Speaks on Blackout Probe
    The Associated Press
    Wednesday, September 3, 2003; 1:33 PM
    WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham promised a focused investigation Wednesday into the cause of the nation's worst blackout and told a congressional hearing that a U.S.-Canadian task force "will follow the facts where they lead us."
    But some Democrats accused the Bush administration and congressional Republicans of trying to use the blackout to push through a broad energy bill that would include drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge and other controversial measures. Different versions of the legislation already have passed the House and Senate.
    "I don't want the blackout to be used to push an (energy) bill that many of us have great difficulty with," said Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., whose state bore the brunt of the Aug. 14 power outage. He said he feared the blackout would be used "`to rubber stamp misguided energy policies" under the guise of repairing the power system.
    Abraham, in remarks prepared for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, refused to speculate on what triggered the Aug. 14 blackout that darkened a huge swath of the nation from Michigan to New York. "Such speculation would be premature," he said.
    He said he and his Canadian counterpart, Herb Dhaliwal, had agreed "to a narrowly focused investigation to determine precisely what happened ... (and) why the blackout was not contained." In a second phase of the investigation, he said, the group will make recommendations on "what should be done to prevent the same thing from happening again."
    Lawmakers vowed, even as the blackout investigation was continuing, to push for new measures that would impose mandatory transmission reliability rules on the electricity industry. But as they began the first of two days of hearings, a partisan flap emerged Wednesday over how to address the most urgent electricity needs.
    Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., committee chairman, promised in the coming weeks to address changes in the nation's power grid as part of a broad energy bill with a target of getting it done before Thanksgiving. "The American public wants us to examine what happened, why and what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.
    Republicans leaders have rejected Democratic attempts to pursue electricity legislation separately, although Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he would introduce this week a bill to impose federal transmission system reliability standards on the industry apart from the broader energy issue.
    Tauzin, said he would strongly oppose the Dingell legislation saying that assurances of a reliable electricity transmission system "is only one component of securing our nation's future energy needs." Other GOP lawmakers said it is also essential to address such issues as natural gas supply and finding ways to produce more energy through tax incentives and other actions.
    In testimony later, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm was to outline the economic repercussions of the blackout on her state. The lost earnings of Michigan workers, as a result of closed factories, businesses and other facilities "will reach the $1 billion mark," she said in testimony prepared for the hearing.
    Other estimates have put the total cost of the blackout from Michigan to New York at as much as $6 billion, but economists acknowledged those preliminary numbers may be low.
    Several witnesses scheduled to appear at the two-day hearing also were expected to complain that the widespread of power outage may have had as much to do with communications breakdowns as anything else.
    Michigan utilities and transmission company executives have told House investigators they were perplexed about why they were not notified sooner by Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. of transmission failures in a number of its Ohio power lines during the hour before the blackout.
    Whatever triggered the power failures, it is agreed that the blackout swept though lines running over the northern leg of the so-called Lake Erie Loop from Ohio through Michigan, into Canada and down through New York state.
    Had Michigan power officials been informed of Ohio's early problems "they may have been able to craft a contingency plan for energy demand and delivery and avoid the cascading failure," Granholm maintained.
    FirstEnergy Corp., repeatedly has dismissed the notion that a single event in its system caused the blackout.
    "The events of the day ... involved thousands of separate and discrete incidents across a widespread, multisystem region," H. Peter Burg, FirstEnergy's chairman and chief executive, wrote House committee investigators.

  • Microbiologists With Link to Race-Based Weapon Turning Up Dead
    08_09_03
    Exclusive to American Free Press
    By Gordon Thomas
    http://www.americanfreepress.net//Microbiologists_With/microbiologists_with.html
    Dr. David Kelly—the biological warfare weapons specialist at the heart of the continuing political crisis for the British government—had links to three other top microbiologists whose deaths have left unanswered questions.
    The 59-year-old British scientist was involved with ultra secret work at Israel’s Institute for Biological Re search. Israeli sources claim Kelly met institute scientists several times in London in the past two years.
    Israel has not signed the Biological Weapons and Toxins Convention, an international treaty ratified by more than 140 countries. It forbids the development, possession and use of offensive biological and chemical weapons.
    The CIA, FBI and MI5 are now examining Kelly’s connections. Their findings could form part of the British government’s inquiry into the background of Kelly’s death, which opened last week.
    The intelligence investigation is believed to have originated in Washington, where it emerged that Kelly had contacts with two companies in the U.S. bio-defense industry.
    One of the men he was in touch with was a former Russian defector, Kamovtjan Alibekov. When he arrived in America, he changed his name to Ken Alibek. He is now president of Hadron Advanced Biosystems—a company specializing in medicines against biological terrorist attacks. Kelly was himself considering resigning from his senior post at the Ministry of Defense to work in America. Before his death, he had been discreetly headhunted by two companies. One was Hadron Advanced Biosystems, which has close ties to the Pentagon.
    Hadron describes itself as “a company specializing in the development of technical solutions for the U.S. intelligence community.” Hadron also has links to William Patrick, who has five classified patents on the process of developing weaponized anthrax. He is a biowarfare consultant to both the Pentagon and the CIA.
    The other company is Regma Biotechnologies—one that Kelly helped its founder, Vladimir Pasechnik, to set up in Britain, arranging for it to have a laboratory at Porton Down, the country’s chem-bio warfare defense establishment.
    Regma currently has a contract with the U.S. Navy for “the diagnostic and therapeutic treatment of anthrax.”
    Kelly had told family friends he wanted to go to America so that he could obtain the specialized treatment his wife, Janice, requires. “He also felt that working in the U.S. private sector would relieve him of the intense pressures which came with his government work,” said a colleague in the Ministry of Defense.
    The two American scientists he had worked with were Benito Que, 52, and Don Wiley, 57. Both microbiologists had been engaged in DNA sequencing that could provide “a genetic marker based on genetic profiling.” The research could play an important role in developing weaponized pathogens to hit selected groups of humans—identifying them by race. Two years ago, both men were found dead, in circumstances never fully explained.
    In November 2001, Que left his laboratory after receiving a telephone call. Shortly afterward he was found comatose in the parking lot of the Miami Medical School. He died without regaining consciousness.
    Police said he had suffered a heart attack. His family insisted he had been in perfect health and claimed four men attacked him. But, later, oddly, the family inquest returned a verdict of death by natural causes.
    Many questions remain about Que’s death:
    Who was the mystery caller who sent Que hurrying from his lab hours before he was scheduled to leave? What attempts did the police make to track the four mystery men—after admitting Que was the “probable” victim of an attempt to steal his car? What were his links to the U.S. Department of Defense? What happened to his sensitive research into DNA sequencing? How close were his connections to Kelly?
    A few days after Que died, Wiley disappeared off a bridge spanning the Mississippi River. He had just left a banquet for fellow researchers in Memphis.
    Weeks later, Wiley’s body was found 300 miles down river. As with Que, his family said he was in perfect health. There was no autopsy. The local medical examiner returned a verdict of accidental death. It was suggested he had a dizzy spell and fell off the bridge.
    Again, there remain many unanswered questions concerning Wiley’s demise:
    Why did Wiley park his car on the bridge? Why did he leave the keys in the ignition and his lights on? Why was Wiley’s car facing in the opposite direction from his father’s house, which was only a short distance away? What happened to his research into DNA sequencing? How close were his connections to Kelly?
    Kelly, himself an expert on DNA sequencing when he was head of microbiology at Porton Down, had been kept fully abreast of the two men’s research.
    The death of a third microbiologist—Vladimir Pasechnik, 64—has left even more questions.
    Kelly had played a key role in debriefing Pasechnik when he fled to Britain in 1989, bringing with him details of Russian plans to use cruise missiles to spread smallpox and plague, the Black Death of medieval times, which killed a third of Europe’s population. Before the plans could be brought to completion, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Pasechnik had warned Kelly and his MI6 debriefers that the weapons could be used by terror groups—using missiles obtained from China or North Korea.
    Kelly, with government approval, had helped Pasechnik create Regma Biotechnologies. Regma was allowed to set up a laboratory in Porton Down.
    Research there is classified as top secret. However, in August 2002, the company obtained a contract with the U.S. Navy for “the diagnostic and therapeutic treatment of anthrax.”
    On Nov. 16, 2001, Pasechnik was found dead in bed—10 days after he and Wiley had met in Boston to discuss the latest developments in DNA sequencing.
    It was only a month later that Christopher Davis, a former MI6 officer and a specialist in DNA sequencing as a potential weapon, announced Pasechnik’s death.
    Davis had retired from MI6 and settled in Great Falls, Va. He confirmed to a reporter that Pasechnik was dead—from a stroke—a month after the microbiologist had been buried.
    Details of the postmortem were not revealed at an inquest, in which the press was given no prior notice. Colleagues who had worked with Pasechnik said he was in good health.
    Why was it left to Davis to announce Pasechnik’s death? Who authorized the announcement? Did an MI6 pathologist conduct the autopsy, as one source close to the service claims? Why did Pasechnik continue to visit Porton Down up to a week before his death? Who authorized his security clearance to enter one of the most restricted establishments in Britain?
    Kelly’s links to the Institute of Biological Research in the Tel Aviv suburb of Nes Zions are also intriguing.
    His connection to the secret biological plant began in October 2001, shortly after a commercial flight en route from Israel to Novosibirsk in Siberia was blown up over the Black Sea by a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile.
    All on board the flight were killed, including five Russian microbiologists returning to their research institute in Novosibirsk—a city known as the scientific capital of Siberia. It has 50 facilities and 13 universities.
    Many questions remain about the death of these five scientists. Why did Mossad send a team to Ukraine to investigate the crash? What became of their report after it was submitted to the Israeli government? Why do the Ukrainian authorities still insist they cannot reveal the name of the dead microbiologists? Did Pasechnik know them—or, more importantly, did Kelly?
    The Institute for Biological Research is one of the most secret places in Israel. Only Dimona, the country’s nuclear facility in the Negev desert, is surrounded by more secrecy. Most of the institute’s 12 acres of facilities are underground. Laboratories are only reached through airlocks.
    There have been persistent reports that the institute is also engaged in DNA sequencing research. One former member of the Knesset, Dedi Zucker, caused a storm in the Israeli Parliament when he claimed that the institute was “trying to create an ethnic specific weapon” in which Arabs could be targeted by Israeli weapons.

  • Small babies linked to 9/11 smoke plume
    06 August 03
    NewScientist.com
    The pall of smoke and dust that hung over Manhattan after the September 11 terrorist attack on New York appears to have caused pregnant women in the vicinity to bear small babies, according to a new study by US researchers.
    Pregnant women who were in the area on the day of the attack or up to three weeks later were twice as likely as women not exposed to the murky cloud to have a child with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). Babies born with this condition are small for the length of their gestation.
    The researchers believe this may be a legacy of the "toxic atmospheric plume" unleashed by the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers after airliners were flown into them in September 2001.
    Trudy Berkowitz, director of epidemiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, led the study and says the air pollution might be compared to cigarette smoke, which is known to reduce growth.
    "We don't really understand how cigarette smoking reduces birth weight, but we can speculate it could affect oxygen levels or blood flow," she told New Scientist. "In that sense particulate matters might have the same effect." The placenta would be particularly vulnerable, she says, because of its vital role in carrying oxygen and nutrients to the fetus.
    Chemical cocktail
    The terrorist atrocity released a chemical cocktail of soot, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, pulverised glass and cement, and alkaline particulates into the lower Manhattan skies, says the team.
    As well as particulate matter, such as soot, PAHs may be particularly significant, they say. PAHs are known to bind to DNA to form complexes - DNA adducts - in the white blood cells in the umbilical cord of mothers exposed to air pollution during pregnancy. This has been associated with reduced size at birth.
    Berkowitz and colleagues studied 182 pregnant women who were near the twin towers at 0900 on the day of the attack, or in the following three weeks. Twelve women were actually in one of the towers when the planes hit.
    These women had a doubled risk of having a baby with IUGR - with 8.2 per cent having IUGR babies compared with only 3.8 per cent of the 2367 mothers attending Mount Sinai Medical Center on the other side of Manhattan.
     However, there were no other significant differences between the two groups including mean birth weight, gestational age, frequency of pre-term births or low birth weight.
    The group also ruled out post-traumatic stress disorder as a possible cause. Berkowitz says the team is now following up the children to study possible long-term effects particularly on their cognitive and psychomotor development.
    Some babies with IUGR never catch up with their counterparts, and grow into lighter and smaller adults. "There's also some evidence there may be adverse neurological outcomes, such as learning difficulties and hyperactivity," she says.
    Journal reference: Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 290, p 595)

  • Report: Feds Fudged Truth On 9/11 Air Quality
    Aug 9, 2003
    (1010 WINS) (NEW YORK) A probe by the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general reportedly found that White House officials told the EPA to reassure the public in statements about air quality in lower Manhattan after the attack on the World Trade Center.
    A draft of the report on the investigation also said the EPA did not have enough information to declare that the air near ground zero was safe seven days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, The New York Times reported Saturday.
    The draft report, which was obtained by the Times, said the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced the content and wording of some of the agency's press releases.
    "As a result of the White House CEQ's influence, guidance for cleaning indoor spaces and information about the potential health affects from WTC debris were not included in the EPA's issued press releases," the report said.
    White House officials told the EPA to add reassuring information -- and delete cautionary information -- from at least one press release, the report said.
    Marianne Lamont Horinko, the EPA's acting administrator, told the Times that the report was "almost like an academic look at an average emergency, and 9/11 wasn't academic or average."
    Horinko said the report was overly focused on press releases, and that the CEQ played an important role in coordinating information.
    "The right word here is collaborate," James Connaughton, chairman of the CEQ, told the Times. "We had to do some very dramatic and significant coordination."
    The EPA has previously been criticized for its public pronouncements on air quality after the collapse of the trade center.

       

  • Fires, drought and pollution as Europe's heat wave breaks records
    August 4, 9:09 PM
    PARIS (AFP) - Large parts of Europe continued to swelter under a record-breaking heat wave that has already caused deadly forest fires, a crisis for many farmers and dangerously high ozone levels.
    In Portugal, nine people have been killed in the worst wave of forest fires in recent history. With 15 out of the country's 18 regions affected, the government was preparing to announce a state of emergency to allow aid funds to be unblocked.
    Fires were also raging in parts of southern and central Spain, where temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) were blamed for the deaths of at least seven people in recent days.
    In France, the fires which killed five people last week have been extinguished, but attention was focussed on the deteriorating plight of livestock and cereal farmers whose livelihood is threatened by the drought now officially declared across more than half the country.
    With 54 out of 98 departments restricting water usage, the government has stepped in to allow cattle and sheep to graze on land that is kept fallow under European Union rules and to subsidise the transport of feed from less-affected areas.
    In France -- but also in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Spain and other countries -- farmers were predicting a drastic fall in cereal and milk yields.
    The price of chicken has gone up by more than 35 percent in Spain, as a result of the heat which has killed more than a million birds and led to dramatic weight loss in the rest, the French newspaper Liberation reported.
    In Britain forecasters were predicting that the country's previous record of 37.1 degrees Celsius -- reached at the English town of Cheltenham in August 1990 -- could be topped midweek, as London joins Paris, Madrid and Lisbon with temperatures in the high 30s.
    Meteorologists said the heat wave was caused by an anti-cyclone firmly anchored over the western European land mass, which is holding back the rain-bearing depressions which in normal years make inroads into the continent from the Atlantic ocean.
    Opinions differ over whether it can be attributed to longer-term climate change linked to the production of greenhouse gases.
    The high temperatures were causing dangerous levels of ozone concentrations in several European cities -- due to a chemical reaction with exhaust fumes -- and in the Paris region the authorities ordered speed restrictions and reduced bus fares to try to reduce the pollution.
    In Switzerland the heat was being partially blamed for the large number of deaths this year in Alpine climbing accidents -- 58 so far compared to 28 in the same period in 2002. Officials said the weather drew hikers higher into the mountains, while melting ice made large areas unstable.
    On the positive side, beaches on the Baltic and Atlantic coasts are enjoying a bumper year: drinks and ice cream sales are soaring; and wine growers say the low rainfall bodes well for a high-quality vintage.

     

  • Portugal Declares Disaster as Heatwave Hits Europe
    Monday, August 4, 2003
    LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal declared a national disaster on Monday due to forest fires that have killed nine people in the last week as a heatwave fanned blazes across Europe.
    The fires in Portugal, the worst in a generation, have flared amid a heatwave stretching from Russia to the Iberian Peninsula and Britain's Atlantic coast.
    The heat has killed at least 12 people in Spain and Germany and threatens to break national temperature records in France and Britain.
    Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said the declaration of a national disaster, approved by the cabinet on Monday, would make more than 100 million euros ($113 million) available in disaster aid.
    "The situation the country is facing is exceptional, caused by absolutely exceptional climatic conditions," he said. "That is why we have to act with exceptional measures."
    Durao Barroso said Portugal would also seek disaster relief funding from the European Union.
    Fires in Spain's Extremadura region, which borders Portugal, and the province of Avila forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes.
    In Spain's southern region of Andalucia, seven people have died from the heatwave since Thursday, a spokeswoman for the regional health service said. Most were elderly.
    Temperatures in the high 30s Centigrade (upper 90s F) caused five deaths in the northern German town of Holzminden over the weekend.
    Construction work on a soccer stadium in Munich was halted on Monday because engineers feared temperatures reaching 36 C (96.8 F) could cause cracks in the structure.
    FIRE SOUTH OF BERLIN
    "Temperatures are certainly unusual and the highest for some years, but it is too early to say whether they are due to climate change," he said.
    In the eastern state of Brandenburg, about 30 hectares (74 acres) of forest were ablaze 60 km (37 miles) south of Berlin, forcing closure of a national road.
    In France, a spokeswoman for the state weather office said temperatures this week were expected to near the national record of 44 C (111.2 F) set in 1923. In Britain, temperatures threatened to top the 37.1 C (98.8 F) all-time high.
    Authorities in southern France have limited water use and there were fears of rising air pollution levels. Many parts of Switzerland have banned open fires for fear of forest fires.
    Britain's rail network slapped speed restrictions on a wide range of lines due to risk of rails buckling and warned of extended journey times.
    Speed limits were cut to 60 miles per hour from the more usual 90 or 120 miles per hour and could go even lower.
    Some 431 fires were raging in Russia. Heavy rain has tamed blazes that devastated swathes of Siberia and the Russian Far East.
    Firefighters in Croatia battled fires on the Adriatic islands of Brac, Hvar and Bisevo, where temperatures reached 37 C (98.6 F). Blazes have burned an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 hectares (12,500 to 15,000 acres) of pine forests, olive groves and scrubland in southern Croatia since last week.
    Smoke from the fires in Portugal's central mountain areas have shrouded much of the Indiana-sized nation and limited the use of water-bombing aircraft.
    More than 2,300 firefighters, mostly volunteers, were tackling 72 blazes in Portugal, which is about one-third forest.
    TIRED FIREFIGHTERS
    Weary firefighters in Semideiro, a town of 1,500 people about 100 km (65 miles) northeast of Lisbon, battled to keep flames from a blazing pine forest away from houses. With afternoon temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), they hoped that a southern wind would hold.
    "If the wind shifts from the south and changes to the north there could be a tragedy, since many towns are at risk," firefighter Manuel Policarpo told Reuters.
    The national Forestry Commission estimated 54,000 hectares (135,000 acres) had burned in the most recent wave of fires which began last week. The figure is slightly more than twice the amount destroyed by fire for the year to July 27.
    A spokesman for the National Rescue Operations Center said nine people had died in the past week. Eight were overcome by flames and a firefighter was killed when a fire truck crashed.
    The heatwave was due to a mass of hot, dry air from the southeast, said Mario Almeida, a spokesman at Portugal's weather service.
     
  • British study links Crohn's disease to milk bug
    LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters) - British scientists said on Wednesday they had found a link between a common bowel disorder and a type of bacteria that can be passed to humans in milk.
    Professor John Hermon-Taylor and his team at St George's Hospital Medical School in London said they had detected Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP) bacteria in 92 percent of patients with Crohn's disease, but in only 26 percent of patients in a control group.
    "The rate of detection of MAP in individuals with Crohn's disease is highly significant and implicates this pathogen in disease causation," they said in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
    "The problems caused by the MAP bug are a public health tragedy," said Hermon-Taylor, who has sent a copy of the paper to Britain's Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson.
    Crohn's disease causes inflammation of the intestine and symptoms include diarrhoea, pain, weight loss and tiredness. About 100,000 people in Britain alone are affected, with about 5,000 new cases reported every year.
    The study was backed by the medical charity Action Research, which said previous findings showed MAP is present in two percent of retail pasteurised milk cartons.
    "The discovery that the MAP bug is present in the vast majority of Crohn's sufferers means it is almost certainly causing the intestinal inflammation," it said in a statement.
    "Action Research does not recommend that anyone stops drinking milk. However, for those individuals with Crohn's disease or their close relatives who may feel particularly at risk, it may be sensible to start drinking UHT milk.
    "As UHT involves higher pasteurisation temperatures, it is probable that MAP is destroyed," it said.
    It called for Crohn's to be made a reportable disease, for more stringent milk pasteurisation, for tests for MAP in dairy herds, and procedures for reducing MAP infection on farms.
    Hermon-Taylor said an unexpected finding of the research showed that patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may also be infected with MAP.
    "In animals, MAP inflames the nerves of the gut," he said. "Recent work from Sweden shows that people with IBS also have inflamed gut nerves. There is a real chance that the MAP bug may be inflaming people's gut nerves and causing IBS."

     
     
     
     

  • Laser lights renders radioactive waste safe
    Wed 6 Aug 2003
    (Scotsman)
    DANGERS associated with radioactive waste, and the problems and huge expense of its disposal could soon end after a Scottish researcher discovered how to neutralise its harmful effects using light.
    New research by a leading scientist at the University of Strathclyde could revolutionise the waning fortunes of the nuclear power industry - restoring both political and public faith in an energy source that was once hailed as the future of clean, green energy.
    Using a laser, Professor Ken Ledingham has successfully transformed one of the deadliest products of nuclear fission into inert matter in minutes.
    The Vulcan laser, housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, has enabled Prof Ledingham and his team to use nothing more than the focused energy contained in light to excite the nucleus of the iodine 129 isotope, with a radioactive half life of 15.7 million years.
    When hit with laser light the isotope becomes totally inert and safe to handle in less than an hour.
    If developed on a commercial scale the technology would transform nuclear power generation from a hazardous and prohibitively expensive means of power production by making it safer and cheaper, as well as opening a potentially huge lead for the UK.
    It is forecast that such lasers could achieve pulse powers greater than the electrical power generated by all the world’s power plants combined. Laser driven nuclear power means that radioactive material can be dealt with on site.
    Prof Ledingham said: "The question of transmutation of all radioactive waste is a long way down the track, probably ten to 20 years. The only way of doing this at present is by building huge accelerators. However, in the same time lasers will develop enormously and so there will be two players on the block."

  • U.S. parents say son in Iraq was casualty of chemical weapons
    Aug 3rd 2003
    LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
    The parents of an American soldier who died in Iraq after contracting a mysterious pneumonialike illness that ravaged his major organs are convinced that their son stumbled across deadly chemical weapons while clearing rubble from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
    Spc. Josh Neusche, 20, who had been conducting cleanup operations in Baghdad, died July 12 after being transferred from his base at the airport to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
    Army specialists are analyzing tissue samples from his liver, kidneys and lungs to determine the cause of death.
    Two U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq have died after their major organs failed. Seven others have reported similarly serious symptoms, although overall about 100 cases have been diagnosed since March 1.
    Lt. Gen. James Peake, the Army surgeon general, has sent two doctors and four other disease specialists to Iraq and two more doctors to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where some of the troops were treated after being flown from Iraq. The teams are retracing the soldiers' steps in hopes of pinpointing the source of infection.
    Mark and Cindi Neusche of Montreal, Mo., told the Sunday Telegraph that their son had lapsed into unconsciousness less than an hour after writing a letter to them in his tent.
    He had begun to complain of a sore throat and difficulty in breathing, and had been making his way to the field dressing station at the camp when he came across a medic, muttered a few words and collapsed at his feet.
    The Army believes Spc. Neusche had been suffering from pneumonia.
    Mr. Neusche, 40, an electrician, said: "I honestly feel that he must have got into some sort of chemical weapon or something. For Josh to fall into a coma in just a few hours, it has to be something like that. He was a strong boy and he knew how to look after himself. This could not have been a natural thing. We have been told that his lungs and kidneys collapsed, and he had toxins eating at his muscle structure."
    Mrs. Neusche, 43, added: "I still want to know what my son died of. But we know that he had been on a hauling mission for 20 hours, and he told us in a letter that he had been clearing rubble from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. I am convinced that he stumbled across something deadly from a chemical weapon that had been buried in that palace."
    Spc. Neusche, who was serving with the 203rd Engineer Battalion in Baghdad, was buried with full military honors in Montreal on July 22 after his body was returned from Germany.
    After the funeral, Rep. Ike Skelton, Missouri Democrat, said: "The Army has confirmed that three or four of the soldiers in Josh's unit are among those who got sick. They are investigating everything it could possibly be. I'm confident that we will get some answers."
    Military officials said there was no evidence that the cases, which are spread among troops deployed across Iraq, were caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, or environmental toxins.
    "It is pneumonia. The question is what is the cause," said Lyn Kukral, spokesman for Gen. Peake and the Army Medical Command.
    "The epidemiological teams will look and follow the facts wherever they lead," she said. "You've got a healthy population and a young population, and you have two soldiers who have died. And that's a concern."
    Fifteen of the 100 soldiers were ill enough to require ventilator support. According to the Army, these severe cases have been spaced out fairly evenly, which doesn't suggest a single-source epidemic. Three occurred in March, three in April, two in May, three in June and four in July.
    Mrs. Neusche said receiving the flag at her son's funeral was an honor.

  • Father of dead soldier claims Army coverup
    WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- The father of a soldier who died of pneumonia this spring said Thursday the Army has excluded her death from its investigation of deadly pneumonia because it wants to cover up vaccine side effects.
    "The government is covering this up and it is a dog-gone shame," said Moses Lacy, whose daughter, Army Spc. Rachael Lacy, died April 4 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., after getting pneumonia.
    Lacy said his daughter "was a healthy young woman" but got ill within days of getting anthrax and smallpox vaccinations on March 2 in preparation for deployment to the Persian Gulf. She was too ill to ever be deployed.
    The Army said 100 soldiers have gotten pneumonia in Iraq and southwestern Asia, two of those have died and another 13 have had to be put on respirators.
    "The common denominator is smallpox and anthrax vaccinations," Moses Lacy said in a telephone interview from his home in Lynwood, Ill. "These young people have given their lives to the military and they are getting a raw deal. The Department of Defense is closing their eyes."
    The Army did not mention vaccines on Tuesday when it held a press conference on the pneumonia investigation. Officials said the pneumonia does not appear to be contagious, and are close to ruling out biological or chemical warfare, SARS and Legionnaire's disease.
    Col. Robert DeFraites of the Army Surgeon General's office said at the press conference that the Pentagon launched the investigation because of the severity of the pneumonia. "Are we seeing more cases in general than we might expect? Despite the harsh environment, the answer is no ... But again, we are still concerned about these severe ones."
    DeFraites told UPI on Wednesday that the Pentagon would look into whether vaccines, among other factors, might have triggered the pneumonia cases. "Among all of the possible causes or contributing factors, we are looking at the immunizations that the soldiers received as well," DeFraites said. "It is premature to say that there is any relationship at all."
    The Army said it is excluding Lacy's death from its investigation because Lacy never made it to Iraq or southwestern Asia where it says the cases are clustered. "She was never deployed to Iraq," Army Surgeon General spokeswoman Virginia Stephanakis told UPI Thursday. She said the military is participating in an investigation of Lacy's death separate from the pneumonia investigation. "It is a whole different issue."
    Moses Lacy disagreed.
    "She should be on that list (of deaths to investigate) because my daughter's first symptoms were pneumonia," Lacy said. "It happened immediately" after the vaccines, Moses said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. If I were a medical official it would be the first thing I would look into."
    Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, told UPI, "We should include in this study any illnesses or deaths that appear to be pneumonia-related that occurred in theater or out of theater."
    Dr. Eric Pfeifer, the Minnesota coroner who performed Lacy's autopsy, told the Army Times that the smallpox and anthrax vaccines "may have" contributed to Lacy's death. "It's just very suspicious in my mind...that she's healthy, gets the vaccinations and then dies a couple weeks later." He listed "post-vaccine" problems on the death certificate.
    Other members of the armed forces not in the Pentagon investigation say the anthrax vaccine has made them very sick with pneumonia-like symptoms. Michael Girard, a Senior Airman at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Fla., got his second anthrax shot on March 4. He developed flu-like symptoms - runny nose and a "heavy chest" - starting March 6 and by March 12 developed a rash on his left arm where he had gotten the shot.
    "Then basically it started attacking my body, section by section," Girard said. He said he has since suffered bouts of vomiting up blood, pain in his feet that made them turn blue, chest pain, constipation, pain in his legs, headaches, stomach aches and extremely high blood pressure. In one weekend he went to the emergency room four times. He says he suffers from insomnia and fatigue.
    At one point, he developed a horrible cough. "They did do a chest X-ray because they thought it might be pneumonia. A nurse told me that it was, but a doctor came in and said that it was not."
    Girard said Air Force doctors first suspected the anthrax vaccine caused his problems, but since have backed away from that diagnosis. "Everything that has been associated with this ever since I got sick has been like a coverup," Girard said. He said he "was perfectly 100 percent healthy" before getting the vaccine. "I was in the gym for an hour to two hours per day. I was running. I was energetic."
    He said he was not scheduled to deploy anywhere.
    In its pneumonia investigation, the Army is looking into the July 12 death of Army Spc. Joshua M. Neusche, 20, of Montreal, Mo. The Pentagon has described his death as "other causes." The Army is also looking at the June 17 death of Army Sgt. Michael L. Tosto, 24, of Apex, N.C. His death is listed as "illness."
    Stephanakis said she was unfamiliar with the June 26 death in Kuwait of another soldier, Army Spc. Cory A. Hubbell, 20, of Urbana, Ill. His death is listed by the Pentagon under "breathing difficulties." Hubbell's mother, Connie Bickers, of Urbana, Ill., told the Champaign News-Gazette that the Army had not told her how her apparently healthy son died. "I wish I had answers, but I don't know if I'm ever going to get them," Bickers told the paper.
    On Thursday, the Pentagon announced the death of Sgt. David L. Loyd, 44, of Jackson, Tenn. The announcement said Lloyd died on Aug. 5 when he "was on a mission when he experienced severe chest pains. The soldier was sent to the Kuwait hospital where he was pronounced dead."
    A co-author of a government-sponsored study of possible side effects from the anthrax vaccine told UPI that the Army should look at whether that vaccine is behind the cluster of pneumonia cases. That study last year found the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia in two soldiers.
    "As physicians, I would think they would be looking at all possible causes. I would think vaccines would be part of that," said Dr. John L. Sever of George Washington University Medical School, who was one of six authors of the study.
    Last year's anthrax vaccine study, printed in the May 2002 issue of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, found that the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia among two soldiers, according to Sever. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services convened the group, called the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee, which studied 602 reports of possible reactions to the vaccine among nearly 400,000 troops who received it, Sever said.
    In addition to identifying pneumonia and flu-like symptoms among troops who received the vaccine, the group also looked at four other cases of potentially serious reactions, including severe back pain and two soldiers who had sudden difficulty breathing in a possible allergic reaction to the vaccine.
    Sever described the two cases of pneumonia as "wheezing and difficulty breathing going into a pneumonia-like picture."
    To conduct the study, the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee examined reports from the U.S. military to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; they are anecdotal reports and do not necessarily show a cause-and-effect relationship.
    Moses Lacy said he believes the real story is about vaccine side effects. "Unless somebody breaks this story wide open, we are going to have a lot more deaths. I am afraid we are going to lose a lot because of this vaccine."

  • Yellowstone Geyser Puzzles Geologists
    Thu Sep 4, 8:58 AM
    By BECKY BOHRER, Associated Press Writer
    YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - Steam wafted over Hank Heasler as he stood on a boardwalk and watched water from Steamboat Geyser shoot into the air with an attention-grabbing "WHOOSH!"
    "This could be it," the park geologist said excitedly, squinting against the morning sun at the impressive spray. But Heasler had no better idea than the tourists around him as to when the world's tallest geyser would next erupt.
    Unlike Old Faithful, Steamboat is anything but predictable. It's gone as few as four days and as many as 50 years between major eruptions — noisy, powerful spectacles that can send hot water 300 feet or higher and churn out dense steam for hours.
    Recently, though, it has been more active — its two eruptions so far this year came just weeks apart — and the emergence of a forceful new thermal feature nearby has scientists like Heasler wondering: What's happening in Norris Geyser Basin, where Steamboat is located?
    "That's the million dollar question. It's changing more than anyone has noticed before," Heasler said. "Are we noticing because we're looking? Or because something is abnormal?"
    Researchers are trying to find answers. They've installed monitoring devices throughout the basin — near features such as Steamboat and in creek channels that collect water runoff from geysers — to gather data on such things as water temperature and flow levels, basic information that, they say, was previously lacking and could help unlock the mysteries of Norris.
    Among them: What's bubbling beneath the shallow surface of the volatile basin and why has the basin floor been steadily bulging upward over the past few years?
    Adding to the intrigue is Norris' location. The basin — filled with hot springs, geysers and steam vents called fumaroles — is outside Yellowstone's caldera, formed by the last volcanic eruption about 640,000 years ago and considered the hotbed for geothermal activity in the park.
    Some 10,000 hot springs and geysers pock the park's landscape, their telltale steam often visible to tourists traveling park roads. But the Norris basin is frequently passed by, viewed from the car by motorists headed south to Old Faithful.
    Perhaps the reason Norris is so dynamic, researchers say, is that there's molten material beneath the basin. Or, maybe, hot water from the caldera has pushed north to Norris.
    The trouble is, very little is known about the inner workings of Norris, where a geyser eruption can trigger the draining — it looks like the flushing — of a nearby pool.
    Scientists for years have studied features within the basin — Steamboat, for example, or Echinus, the world's only acidic geyser. But the basin's "vital signs," measurements like the amount of heat it puts out or the volume of water it generates, are hard to come by.
    Relying now on grants, researchers hope to continue monitoring efforts for at least the next three years, using what they find with satellite imagery and other information, such as climate data, to help piece together the puzzle.
    "Our goal is to understand what's driving the volcanic system, and are there indications it could be moving into a period of unrest?" said Jacob Lowenstern, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites) and scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, a consortium that monitors the volcano and regional earthquakes (news - web sites).
    Better understanding the Norris basin in west-central Yellowstone and its volatility is important to visitor safety. So far, there's no cause for alarm and no apparent looming threat, Lowenstern said. Steamboat's renewed eruptions and the basin rising several centimeters in the past few years could just be normal activity, he said.
    The geyser's first major eruption was reported in 1878. After that, it flared up occasionally before lying largely dormant from 1911-61. Observers say the 1960s and the early 1980s were fairly active.
    Then, quiet again, until May 2000. That was followed by two eruptions in 2002 and two more again this spring — March 26 and April 27.
    Paul Strasser, a self-proclaimed "geyser gazer" from Colorado, has returned to the park religiously to document even the minor stirrings of Steamboat since seeing the first of two major eruptions in 1982.
    Though Strasser doubts it will ever be predictable or that its activity is somehow linked to the inner workings of Norris, he believes Steamboat may behave a certain way leading to an eruption.
    "Steamboat does what it darn well wants to," he said. "Whether there is more activity now, I don't know. All I can look for is the patterns."
    Heasler said the new research could help determine if Steamboat is a reliable predictor of more significant activity in the basin. But, for now, he is like the tourists and interpretive ranger John Tebby, taken with the shooting spray of the almost daily minor bursts and hoping to be around for the next Big One.
    "It's one of the reasons I love being here, having the chance to see it," Tebby said. "It's like they say, 'You can't win the lottery unless you buy a ticket.'"

  • Bulge in Yellowstone lake worries scientists
    July 30, 2003
    By CAROLE CLOUDWALKER
    codyenterprise.com
    Beneath the serene surface of Yellowstone Lake, where death from hypothermia comes within 30 minutes, seethes a boiling underwater world.
    And like a pot too long on the stove, it could boil over, says U.S. Geological Survey geologist Lisa Morgan, Ph.D., of Colorado.
    She and others from the USGS have been studying the hottest hot spot in the 7,731-foot elevation lake, a spot which Morgan has termed an "inflated plain." It lies south-southwest of Storm Point near Mary Bay, in the northern end of the lake.
    Morgan, representing both the USGS and Yellowstone Volcanic Observatory, is in the process of mapping the lake floor with seismic reflection images. She uses a sonar system that emits sound waves. Morgan has taken 240 million soundings in the last four years.
    She has found that temperatures along the inflated plain have been recorded at about 85 degrees 60 feet down, where the plain bulges up about 100 feet above the lake floor. (Park spokesman Cheryl Matthews says the lake rarely reaches more than 66 degrees at the surface by late summer, and is much colder deeper down.) The inflated plain stretches 2,100 feet - about the length of seven football fields - across.
    "We think this is very young," something that occurred in the last few years, Morgan said.
    "We're thinking this structure could be a precursor to an hydrothermal explosive event," Morgan said last week. "But we don't think this is a volcano."
    If the bulge should explode, "we think it would create a large crater." But such an explosion, smaller versions of which created Indian Pond, Duck Lake and Mary Bay itself, would probably heat up the water temporarily, create high waves, spew poison gasses and other materials into the lake for a time, and leave a rimmed underwater crater.
    Or it could do nothing.
    Explosive events are, of course, not new in Yellowstone. Regional volcanoes once sent forth material across much of what is now the U.S.
    "And Mary Bay is the world's largest hydrothermal explosion crater," Morgan said. Also lurking under water west of Indian Pond is Elliott's Crater, some 2,400 feet in diameter.
    Powerful geologic processes contributed to the unusual shape of Yellowstone Lake, according to articles in the most recent edition of "Yellowstone Science," which describes Morgan's study. One of Morgan's objectives is to understand these processes.
    Morgan is returning to Yellowstone in early August to further study the inflated plain, which she said "showed pretty radical changes" last summer. She and her USGS team will utilize a raft-like boat that resembles a high-tech Kon Tiki.
    It carries, among other things, a small, red robotic submarine. The "ROV" will dive down to the underwater structure, land on it, scrape samples of rock and sand from its surface, and put in place devices that will measure any further changes to the structure.
    By fall, Morgan and her team hope to prepare a "danger assessment" indicating how likely the plain is to explode, and if it does, what the scenario might be.
    At this point in her work, Morgan has outlined two possibilities for the plain:
    It could do nothing, and "freeze in time," becoming dormant.
    It could explode, making a "large crater a couple of thousand feet in diameter."
    If the dome blows, 10-foot waves could wash the lake shore, rocks and pieces of lake floor could be tossed into the air, and "chemicals containing toxic materials" could be discharged into the lake.
    "There would be lots of water," Morgan said. Not the blue serenity of the present lake surface, but roiling, spewed-out hot water.
    "But we don't think this is a volcano," Morgan said last week. Still, that possibility is being considered. She said what is causing the bulge is likely either carbon dioxide gas or steam. "We're trying to put monitoring equipment on the structure to see changes over time."
    "We have no evidence there's any volcanic component" to the bulging dome, she added.

  • Yellowstone Park closes rivers to fishing due to rising water temperatures
    July 23, 2003
    codyenterprise.com
    Three Yellowstone Park rivers were closed to fishing indefinitely Tuesday because of rising water temperatures.
    The Madison River, Firehole River and Gibbon River up to Gibbon Falls are closed, Yellowstone superintendent Suzanne Lewis said.
    "Water temperatures in these rivers are unusually high due to the combination of thermal runoff and the unprecedented warm temperatures in the region," Lewis said.
    Temperatures in the Firehole River have been above 79 degrees since July 10. The Gibbon River has been above 73 degrees almost daily since July 10.
    Water temperatures of 77 degrees can be lethal to trout. In addition, as rivers warm, incidental-hooking mortalities increase, further affecting fish populations, Lewis said.
    Trout in the three rivers have adapted to living at higher temperatures.
    A study conducted along the Firehole River showed rainbow and brown trout migrate to tributaries or colder portions of the river when water exceeds 75 degrees.
    The rivers will remain closed to fishing until the daily maximum temperature decreases to below 73 degrees for three consecutive days and the seven-day weather forecast calls for lower maximum daily temperatures.
    Other park waters normally open to fishing remain open.

  • Yellowstone Park Getting Hotter - Closes Volcanic Basin
    From The Yellowstone Newsletter
    8-1-3
    Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis announced that due to high ground temperatures and increased thermal activity that could affect visitor and employee safety, a portion of the Back Basin at Norris Geyser Basin on the west side of the park has been temporarily closed. Yellowstone's more popular features within the Norris Geyser Basin, including Steamboat and Echinus Geysers and all of Porcelain Basin, remain open to the public.
    The temporary closure is clearly marked and covers most of the western portion of the Back Basin trail starting at the Norris Museum. There are approximately 12,500 feet of trails in the Norris Geyser Basin-with approximately 5,800 feet affected by the temporary closure.
    Norris is the hottest and most seismically active geyser basin in Yellowstone. Recent activity in the Norris Geyser Basin has included formation of new mud pots, an eruption of Porkchop Geyser (dormant since 1989), the draining of several geysers, creating steam vents and significantly increased measured ground temperatures (up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit). Additional observations include vegetation dying due to thermal activity and the changing of several geysers' eruption intervals. Vixen Geyser has become more frequent and Echinus Geyser has become more regular.
    Park staff continue to monitor temperatures and thermal features in the area. When conditions have returned to acceptable ground temperatures and stable surface conditions have improved, the trail will be reopened. Norris is another example of Yellowstone's thermal features that are constantly evolving and changing.

  • The Volcano That May Destroy Mankind
    New Scientist Magazine
    07/29/03
    In Britain, a scientist has predicted that another volcanic super- eruption the size of Toba could pose twice as much of a threat to civilization as a collision with an asteroid or a comet.
    Michael Rampino, of New York University, warned that a massive volcanic eruption capable of causing as much devastation as the cosmic bodies, occurs every 50,000 years.
    "Volcanoes in Yellowstone Park and Long Valley in California have erupted three times in the past two million years, each time coating the whole of the U.S. with ash" he said.
    REF: New Scientist Magazine on Wednesday.
    "But the biggest and and the most recent super-eruption happened at Toba, on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra, 73,000 yrs ago" he added.
    According to Rampino's research, Toba blasted a crater 100 kms long and sent 3 billion tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and a dense volcanic cloud around the globe.
    "He also suspects that Toba's super-eruption was responsible for the population crash of 70,000 years ago, when the number of people fell to no more than 10,000", the magazine added.
    Michael Rampino warned that this kind of super- eruption occurs every 50,000 years.
    Other research indicates that as the cooling of the earth had already commenced, Toba then was the indicating point for the commencement of the ice-age.
     

  • Israel imposes 'racist' marriage law
    Palestinian-Israeli couples will be forced to leave or live apart
    By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
    01 August 2003
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=429490
    Israel's Parliament has passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis from living in Israel. The move was denounced by human rights organisations as racist, undemocratic and discriminatory.
    Under the new law, rushed through yesterday, Palestinians alone will be excluded from obtaining citizenship or residency. Anyone else who marries an Israeli will be entitled to Israeli citizenship.
    Now Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip will either have to move to the occupied territories, or live apart from their husband or wife. Their children will be affected too: from the age of 12 they will be denied citizenship or residency and forced to move out of Israel.
    Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch sent a joint letter to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, urging members to reject the bill. "The draft law barring family reunification for Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens is profoundly discriminatory," Amnesty said in a statement. "A law permitting such blatant racial discrimination, on grounds of ethnicity or nationality, would clearly violate international human rights law and treaties which Israel has ratified and pledged to uphold."
    B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, joined in the criticism of the law. Yael Stein, a spokesman, said: "This is a racist law that decides who can live here according to racist criteria."
    Some Israelis believe they are sitting on a demographic time bomb, with an Israeli Arab community, already 20 per cent of the population, growing faster than the Jewish population.
    The discrimination is not only against Palestinians, according to human rights groups, but against Israel's own 1.2 million citizens of Palestinian origin as well. The overwhelming majority of Israelis who marry Palestinians are the so-called Israeli Arabs - Palestinians who live in Israel and have Israeli citizenship.
    "This bill blatantly discriminates against Israelis of Palestinian origin and their Palestinian spouses," said Hanny Megally of Human Rights Watch. "It's scandalous that the Government has presented this bill, and it's shocking that the Knesset is rushing it through."
    The government pushed the vote through at speed, even agreeing to consider it a vote of confidence to get it through. It was passed by 53 votes to 25, with one abstention.
    Gideon Ezra, a cabinet minister, said: "This law comes to address a security issue. Since September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks, between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs."
    Since 1993, more than 100,000 Palestinians have become Israeli citizens through marriage, Mr Ezra said. But B'Tselem pointed out that only 20 of those 100,000 have been involved in suicide bombings or other militant attacks. Human rights groups said security concerns could not justify the new law, which amounts to collective punishment. Noam Hoffstater, another spokesman for B'Tselem, said: "Those who voted for the bill and those who support it are making a very cynical use of security arguments to justify it, even though they used no data. This in fact was a cover for the real reason, which is the racist reason, the demographic reason."
    Many on Israel's right fear that it will be impossible to maintain Israel's identity as an officially Jewish state if the Arab sector becomes too large.
    "Today I lost hope," Sa'id abu Muammar, an Israeli Arab, told Reuters news agency. He has been hiding his Palestinian wife from the police since their marriage a year ago. "This is what we've been doing and this is probably what we will have to continue to do."

  • The Mystery Of The Dead Scientists
    Coincidence Or Conspiracy?
    By Ian Gurney
    7-20-3
    http://www.rense.com/general39/death.htm
    It is a story worthy of a major conspiracy theory, the script for a James Bond movie, or a blueprint for a contrived episode of "The X Files". Except the facts surrounding this story are just that. Facts. The Truth. At least twelve, and perhaps as many as twenty eminent scientists, leaders in their particular field of scientific research, dead in the last few months, and a bizarre connection between one of the scientists and the mystery surrounding the death by Anthrax inhalation of a sixty one year old female hospital worker in New York. Sounds far fetched? Read on.

    Since November last year several world-acclaimed scientific researchers, specialising in infectious diseases and biological agents such as Smallpox and Anthrax, as well as DNA sequencing, environmental research and microbiology have died, many in unusual circumstances.

    First, on November 12th, was Dr. Benito Que, a cell biologist working on infectious diseases like HIV, who was found comatose outside his laboratory at the Miami Medical School. He later died. Police say the attack was possibly the result of a mugging. The Miami Herald reported that:

    "The incident, whatever it may have been, occurred on Monday afternoon as the scientist left his job at University of Miami's School of Medicine. He headed for his car, a white Ford Explorer parked on Northwest 10th Avenue. The word among his friends is that four men armed with a baseball bat attacked him at his car."

    On November 16th, within of week of Dr. Que's assault, Dr. Don C Wiley, one of the United States foremost infectious disease researchers was declared missing. Associated Press wrote:

    "His rental car was found with a full tank of petrol and the keys in the ignition. His disappearance looked like a suicide, but according to colleagues and Dr. Wiley's family, the Harvard Scientist associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute would never commit suicide. Associates who attended the St. Jude's Children Research Advisory Dinner with Dr. Wiley, just hours before he disappeared, said that he was in good spirits and not depressed. He was last seen at the banquet at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis the night he vanished. Those who saw him last say he showed no signs of a man contemplating his own death."

    Wiley left the hotel around midnight. The bridge where his car was found is only a five-minute drive away and in the wrong direction from where he was staying, leaving authorities with a four-hour, unexplained gap until his vehicle was found. Memphis police were exploring several theories involving suicide, robbery and murder.

    On December 21st Reuters issued the following report:

    "The body of a Harvard scientist missing for more than a month since his rental car was left parked on a bridge over the Mississippi River has been found downstream. Workers at a hydro-electric plant in Louisiana found the body of Dr. Don Wiley on Thursday, about 300 miles south of Memphis where the molecular biologist was last seen on Nov. 16. Authorities have yet to determine the cause of death, Memphis police said."

    Dr. Wiley was an expert on how the human immune system fights off infections and had recently investigated such dangerous viruses as AIDS, Ebola, herpes and influenza.

    From the United States, the story moves to England. On November 23rd, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a former microbiologist for Biopreparat, the Soviet biological-weapons production facility was found dead. The Times provided an obituary for Dr. Pasechnik, and said:

    "The defection to Britain in 1989 of Vladimir Pasechnik revealed to the West for the first time the colossal scale of the Soviet Union's clandestine biological warfare programme. His revelations about the scale of the Soviet Union's production of such biological agents as anthrax, plague, tularaemia and smallpox provided an inside account of one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War. After his defection he worked for ten years at the UK Department of Health's Centre for Applied Microbiology Research before forming his own company, Regma Biotechnics, to work on therapies for cancer, neurological diseases, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. In the last few weeks of his life he had put his research on anthrax at the disposal of the Government, in the light of the threat from bioterrorism." Colleagues of Dr. Pasechnik say he died of a stroke.

    Back to the United States, and on December 10th, Dr. Robert M. Schwartz was found murdered in Leesberg, Virginia. Dr. Schwartz was a well-known DNA sequencing researcher. He founded the Virginia Biotechnology Association where he worked on DNA sequencing for 15 years. On Wednesday, December 12th the Washington Post reported:

    "A well-known biophysicist, who was one of the leading researchers on DNA sequencing analysis, was found slain in his rural Loudoun County home after co-workers became concerned when he didn't arrive at work as expected. Robert M. Schwartz, 57, a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, was found dead in the secluded fieldstone farmhouse southwest of Leesburg where he lived alone. Loudoun sheriff's officials said it appeared that Schwartz had been stabbed." An adult and two teen-agers have been arrested in the case. The three are said to have a fascination with both swords and Satanism.

    And so to Victoria State, Australia, where, on December 14th. 2001 a skilled microbiologist was killed at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's animal diseases facility in Geelong, Australia. This is the same organisation that, as the journal Nature announced in January 2000:

    "Australian scientists, Dr Ron Jackson and Dr Ian Ramshaw, accidentally created an astonishingly virulent strain of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, among laboratory mice. They realised that if similar genetic manipulation was carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable killer could be unleashed."

    The microbiologist who died was Set Van Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant who had worked at the facility for 15 years. Victoria Police said:

    "Set Van Nguyen, 44, appeared to have died after entering an airlock into a storage laboratory filled with nitrogen. His body was found when his wife became worried after he failed to return from work. He was killed after entering a low temperature storage area where biological samples were kept. He did not know the room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Unable to breathe, Mr. Nguyen collapsed and died."

    Now for the intriguing part of this story. On Friday, November 2nd, the Washington Post reported:

    "Officials are now scrambling to determine how a quiet, 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, riding the subway each day to and from her job in a hospital stockroom, was exposed to the deadly anthrax spores that killed her this week. They worry because there is no obvious connection to the factors common to earlier anthrax exposures and deaths: no clear link to the mail or to the media."

    The name of this quiet 61 year old Vietnamese hospital worker was Kathy Nguyen.

    And so to the New Year, and still the scientists keep dying. On February 9th. the Russian daily Pravda reported that:

    "The head of the microbiology sub-faculty of the Russian State Medical University, Victor Korshunov has been killed. The body of the dead professor, who had head injuries, was found on Friday 8th. February, in the entrance of the house in Academician Bakulev Street, Moscow, where the 56-year-old scientist lived." Pravda went on to reveal that: "It was the third death of a scientist within a few weeks. In January, the Russian Academy of Science lost two scientists, both well known around the world. Academician Ivan Glebov died as a result of a bandit attack in St Petersburg and corresponding Member of the Academy of Science Alexi Brushlinski was killed in Moscow."

    Exactly a week later, on February 16th. The Times ran the following article:

    "Detectives were last night trying to unravel the circumstances in which a leading university research scientist was found dead at his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home. The body of Ian Langford, 40, a senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia's Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, was discovered on Monday night by police and ambulancemen. The body was naked from the waist down and partly wedged under a chair. It is understood that doors to the terraced house were locked. A post-mortem examination failed to establish how Dr Langford, who lived alone in the house in Norwich, died."

    Back to the west coast of the United States, where, on February 28th. San Francisco's Mercury News reported that:

    "Dr. Tanya Holzmayer, a pioneering scientist, was surprised Wednesday night to find a Domino's Pizza deliveryman at the front door of her Mountain View home. Moments later, a former colleague appeared out of the dark, shot her dead and ran off."

    Dr. Holzmayer was a Russian born genomic scientist who had co-invented a tool that has helped find hundreds of molecular targets to combat cancer and HIV. Holzmayer and her family came to the United States in 1989. Until December, Holzmayer had served a four year tenure as senior vice president of genomics for PPD Discovery, a division of PPD Inc. of Wilmington, North Carolina. Her killer, said Mercury News, was Chinese immigrant Guyang Huang, a former colleague who began working as the director of molecular biology and bioinformatics with PPD Discovery in early 2000. Mercury News continued:

    "Huang appeared from behind the deliveryman. He shot Holzmayer several times at close range in the chest and head. As Holzmayer fell in her doorway, Huang ran to a Ford Explorer and drove away. Less than an hour after the shooting, Huang called his wife, according to Foster City Police Capt. Craig Courtin. He told her about the shooting and that he was going to kill himself, then he hung up. Huang's wife called the emergency services and Foster City police used search dogs to comb the area.. They ran into a jogger who had seen Huang's body lying off the walkway that locals call "The Levee." He had fired a single bullet into his head, according to Robert Foucrault, San Mateo County's acting coroner. Police said that at this stage in their investigations there appeared to be no motive for the murder."

    Still the deaths continue. On March 25th. 2002 9News.com - part of K*USA TV in Denver, reported that:

    "Denver car dealer Kent Rickenbaugh, his wife, Caroline, and their son Bart were killed Sunday in a plane crash near Centennial Airport. Pilot Dr. Steven Mostow also died. Dr. Mostow, 63, was one of the country's leading infectious disease experts and was Associate Dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Mostow was a crusader for better health, an early advocate for widespread flu vaccinations and more recently an expert on the threat of bioterrorism. The plane was headed for Centennial Airport from Gunnison Airport when Dr. Mostow reported engine trouble around 4:30 p.m., Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jerry Snyder said. National Transportation Safety Board investigators said "Weather did not appear to be a factor in the crash",

    Back to England, and on March 27th. The Times carried an obituary for yet another leading microbiologist, stating that:

    "David Wynn-Williams, an award-winning microbiologist died when he was struck by a vehicle while out jogging. In 2000 he was appointed leader of the Antarctic Astrobiology Project, which explores the effects of environmental stress at the limits of life on Earth. Wynn-Williams had assessed the capability of microbes to adapt to environmental extremes, including the bombardment of ultraviolet rays and global warming. This drew Wynn-Williams into collaboration with the Nasa Ames Research Centre, the Johnson Space Centre and Lunar & Planetary Institute, Houston, and Montana State University. A man of boundless physical as well as intellectual energy, Wynn-Williams generated a constant flow of ideas, which entranced both his contemporaries and the young. He was killed in a road accident while out jogging near his Cambridge home."

    So far then, twelve dead scientists, at least eight or nine of whom appear to have died in "unusual" circumstances. Prior to these deaths, on October 4th, a commercial jetliner travelling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia was shot down over the Black Sea by an "errant" Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, killing all on board. The missile was over 100 miles off-course. According to several press reports, the plane is believed by many in Israel to have had as many as five passengers on board who were microbiologists. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, and home to over 50 research facilities and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people.

    At the time of the Black Sea crash, Israeli journalists reported that three Israeli microbiologists had, on November 24th, been on board a Swissair flight from Berlin to Zurich that crashed on its landing approach. Of the 33 persons on board, 24 were killed, including the head of the haematology department at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, and the directors of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and the Hebrew University School of Medicine. They were the only Israelis on the flight. The names of those killed, as reported in a subsequent Israeli news story, were Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor and Yaacov Matzner.

    In light of the deaths of these microbiologists, it is interesting to take a look at a similar set of circumstances that occurred fourteen years ago in the United Kingdom. Once again it involves the deaths of a number of scientists, some in "unusual" circumstances. The report below was taken from The Independent newspaper of August 26, 1988.

    "The police said it was suicide, and no doubt they were right. Ex-Brigadier Peter Ferry, a marketing manager at Marconi's Command and Control Systems centre at Frimley, Surrey, had apparently killed himself by inserting power main electric wires into his mouth and then turning on the power.

    The method chosen was perhaps marginally more grisly than in the case of several other Marconi employees. In 1986, for example, Ashad Sharif, a computer analyst who worked for Marconi Defence Systems in Stanmore, Middlesex, tied one end of a rope around his neck, another to a tree, and put his car into gear. Two months earlier, the body of Vimal Dajibhai, a software engineer responsible for checking the guidance systems of Tigerfish torpedos for Marconi Underwater Systems, was found under Clifton suspension bridge at Bristol.

    In March 1987, David Sands, a project manager working on secret satellite radar at Marconi's sister company Easams, in Camberley, drove up a slip road on his way to work and into a cafe at an estimated 80mph. A year later, Trevor Knight, a computer engineer at Marconi's space and defence base in Stanmore, died in his fume-filled car at his home in Hertfordshire. Earlier, two other Marconi employees, Victor Moore, a design engineer, and Roger Hill, a draughtsman, had killed themselves, both seemingly as a result of work pressures.

    There have been at least half a dozen more untoward deaths among defence scientists and others working in the defence field. Marconi is not alone, but it is well in the lead. The best efforts of investigative journalists have failed to establish a link either between the various deaths or between the deaths of the Marconi staff and the Ministry of Defence inquiry, now two years old, into some £3billion worth of defence contracts awarded to GEC-Marconi. "
    --The Independent August 26, 1988.

    Interestingly, Marconi was recently declared virtually bankrupt after it's shares fell below "junk" status on the UK stock exchange. Both the chairman and C.E.O. resigned and a great many employees have lost their jobs and pensions as the share price fell from a twelve month high of £4:45 to only 5 pence. Marconi, once a major player in the defence industry had, over the last few years, moved into the Telecoms sector and suffered when the downturn in technology and telecom stocks came along last year. A company once worth billions is now worthless, a situation that is somewhat similar to Enron.

    Whether these recent deaths are purely coincidence or part of some sinister plot, the reasons for which can only be guessed at, remains unclear. What is clear though, is that being a scientist these days can be a dangerous occupation.

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