An American researcher who believes she has found the final resting place of Jesus Christ is campaigning to exhume a body at a Muslim shrine in Kashmir for scientific tests. (Times of India)
Was Kashmir Jesus' final resting place?
AFP [ MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2002 10:07:27 AM ]
RINAGAR: An American researcher who believes she has found the final resting place of Jesus Christ is campaigning to exhume a body at a Muslim shrine in Kashmir for scientific tests.
Suzanne Marie Olsson, a New York-based researcher is currently in Srinagar, studying the Muslim shrine of Rozabal.
While Muslims say Rozabal houses the tomb of Yuza Asaf, a Muslim saint, many researchers believe it contains the body of Jesus Christ.
To put an end to speculation Olsson has suggested exhuming the remains at Rozabal for DNA testing and carbon dating.
"This will trace him (the saint) to his origin ... and resolve the raging controversy over the identity of the place forever," she told the Sunday edition of Kashmir's leading daily, the Greater Kashmir.
Olsson has already dug up a shrine at the Murree hill station in Pakistan under the supervision of archaeologists Ahmad Hassan Dani and Saida Rahman.
Muree is believed to be the resting place of Jesus' mother, Mary (Marium).
"The exhumed remains have been sent for the DNA testing and the report is awaited," she told the newspaper.
"Now Rozabal holds the key. If the remains there are sent for testing and then tallied with the results of the Murree project, it will either establish the link between the two shrines as being of similar origin and thus authenticate the Marium-Jesus theory or prove it wrong for good."
However, her project has run into trouble with the managers of the Rozabal shrine, who are strongly opposed to its "desecration".
"We will never allow it," said Mohammed Amin, one of the managers.
But Olsson, stressing the "purely scientific nature of her work" and her identity as a "seeker of truth", is pleading to be allowed to "verify the origin and identity of the saint" to put to rest wild speculation.
She has even written to Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah for help.
Olsson also believes Moses is buried in Bandipore in north Kashmir, the Islamic prophet Haroun at Harwan, on the outskirts of Srinagar, and Solomon at Takht-i-Suliaman in Srinagar.
"You have more Christian holy sites than even Egypt or Israel," she said in her appeal to the chief minister.
Olsson says she wants to unravel the truth about the shrines so that the scenic Himalayan region of Kashmir, can become a pilgrimage centre for Christians and Muslims.
Jan. 23 2002
It’s a story of Jesus Christ, and it goes a little something like this: Jesus didn’t die up on his cross at Golgotha. That was his brother. Christ himself fled across Siberia and, after a brief detour through Alaska, landed in Japan — where he got married and raised a family.
The town, Shingo, calls itself Kirisuto no Sato: Hometown of Christ.
Not many burgs outside of Bethlehem make that claim.
Today, Shingo is known more for its garlic farms (they even make garlic ice cream there) and apple orchards than the Tomb of Christ — that is, if it were to be known for anything at all (it’s not).
The site itself, a few minutes’ drive from the town’s tiny commercial district, is rather unspectacular. Two 8-foot-high wooden crosses surrounded by a white picket fence sit on a bluff in the woods overlooking a gravel parking lot. A small museum sits at the other side of the parking lot.
On a typical day, dozens of people wander through. Some leave a small offering — five-yen coins, considered lucky, are common — in a basket at the gravesite. Some even pray.
The idea of Jesus visiting, much less settling down in, Japan’s equivalent of the Ozarks may sound patently absurd. Even many locals doubt the tale. But some residents of Shingo say it’s entirely plausible that the man many call Messiah came here, and claim they can prove it.
An Ancient Scroll and a Remarkable Tale
In the years leading up to World War II, ancient scrolls turned up in the hands of a Shinto priest just outside of Tokyo. They pertained to two small, forgotten graves in the remote mountains of northern Honshu, the main island of Japan
The scrolls — written in a Japanese so archaic that only experts can read it — recount the unlikely tale of Christ’s escape from death, and were purportedly written — or at least dictated — by Jesus himself as his last will and testament. Call it the Last Testament.
When the priest realized what he had uncovered, he summoned Banzan Toya, an artist/researcher specializing in ancient Japanese history. Together, they located two graves in a bamboo grove on the ancestral land of the Sawaguchi family, whose tradition held that the burial site remain undisturbed, but did not explain why.
According to the scrolls, one tomb holds the ears of Jesus’ brother, Isukiri, and a lock of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s hair, while Christ himself rests in the one directly opposite.
The scrolls talk of Christ’s “lost” years, during which, they say, he traveled to Japan for spiritual training. Years later, when he was condemned to die in Judea, he escaped to his adopted hometown.
In Shingo, locals held him in awe as the “long-nosed goblin.” Christ supposedly changed his name to Daitenku Taro Jurai, sired a biblical three daughters and lived to the ripe old age of 106.
A Dubious Character and His Hunt for Pyramids
The original scrolls were lost in the war, but a copy survives, and is on display — in a glass case — at a museum on the Tomb of Christ grounds.
There are some obvious problems with this tale. First, if true it would undermine the entire basis for the Christian faith: for the religion to be valid, Jesus had to die on the cross. It also contradicts the Bible, which details his crucifixion.
The scroll was discovered in the intensely nationalistic climate of the prewar years; similar “discoveries” document Moses’ trip to Japan, where the divine emperor gave him the Ten Commandments and the Hebrew language, not to mention the Star of David.
Toya himself was a bit of a dubious character; he traveled Japan in search of seven ancient pyramids, far older than those of Egypt. The day after he uncovered the Tomb of Christ, Toya “found” one of the pyramids nearby — a strange collection of rocks atop a small hill and a large, flat slab he claimed was a fallen monolith.
A surreal road sign near the tomb of Christ today features notations in English and Japanese denoting the locations of “Tomb of Christ” and “pyramid.” This just before the chapel-shaped Tomb of Christ bus stop, where nearby ads would lead a passing tourist to believe the site was in some way sponsored or recognized by Coca-Cola.
But the tale cannot be dismissed offhand. It is very likely the someone — or something — is buried in the tomb below. Locals say archaeologists have confirmed that a very old crypt does, in fact, exist beneath the gravesite, and the town claims some interesting customs that predate the modern “rediscovery” of the tomb.
Until recently, for example, newborn children in Shingo were decorated with a black cross on the forehead.
Locals Make a Living Off the Jesus Legend
Even if they don’t quite believe the story, the people of Shingo know a good thing when they see it.
“It’s just a way of attracting tourists, making money,” said Father Marcel Poliquin, a Roman Catholic priest in Towada, about 45 miles from Shingo.
At local gift shops, believers and nonbelievers alike can buy Jesus coasters, Jesus thermometers, Jesus telephone cards and more.
One shop even sells “Kirisuto no Sato” sake.
Visitors to the tomb also inevitably pony up a few hundred yen to visit the museum, and the town’s big annual draw is a festival at the gravesite. There, local dancers march around the graves banging drums and singing in a language no one understands — but some say is derivative of ancient Hebrew.
“Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not,” says one friendly local in a neighborhood bar. “It’s a legend.”
A schoolgirl who lives in a nearby town says she’s never been to the gravesite.
“But it’s probably a lie,” she adds.
Father Marcel tries to see the humor in the heresy.
“I say it as a joke: ‘Christ died in my parish.’”
So who, if anyone, is buried in the Tomb of Christ?
Some speculate that it was an early leader of Japan’s indigenous Ainu population. Some say an ancient wise man. Others believe that an early Christian missionary rests below.
Or, perhaps, nothing at all.
11 March 2002
The US has now offered to negotiate with opposition Afghan Mujahideen to secure the exchange of 18 of its captured soldiers, two of whom are thought to be senior US military officials.
The sources disclosed that as soon as news of the arrest of the soldiers reached the Commander in charge of operation Anaconda, Gardez, Major General Franks, he immediately gave the order to halt the operation and ground US warplanes. He then sent a delegation of two senior military officials to meet the Governor of Paktika Wardaag to relay the offer to the Mujahideen commander, Mulla Saif ur Rehman Mansoor.
The US withdrew over 400 of its soldiers yesterday claiming that they have almost accomplished their mission to destroy the mujahideen concentration in Gardez. Mujahideen sources said that the Commander in Charge of Mujahideen in Gardez Mulla Saif ur Rehman Mansoor, has called a council meeting to discuss the American offer.
Some Mujahideen sources said that they may demand freedom for all Afghan, Arab and Pakistani mujahideen currently being held at Camp X-Rayin Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a separate incident a motorcycle troop of Mujahideen raided a US convoy in Tehsil Sarbi which is near to Tehsil Urgan of Paktika province. In this operation the Mujahideen successfully killed 6 US soldiers, escaping without harm.
By Robert Fisk, Special to Arab News
BEIRUT, 12 March — The secrets of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camp massacres in 1982 have gone to the grave with yet another former Phalangist militiaman, the third Lebanese to die mysteriously in little more than two months.
Michael Nassar, who was a former associate of Elie Hobeika — the Phalangist leader murdered in a car bombing in Beirut in January — was shot dead in Brazil by a man firing a pistol equipped with a silencer. His young wife, Marie, was shot down beside him. A Belgian court has postponed a decision over whether to indict Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, for his role in the massacres — he was held “personally responsible” by an Israeli commission of inquiry — while lawyers for the survivors produce more evidence. But the vital evidence that may lie in the memories of those involved with the killers, who were allied to Israel at the time, is disappearing almost by the week as the death list grows.
Nassar grew immensely wealthy from the Lebanese civil war, selling former Phalangist weapons to Croatian militias during the Balkan conflict. One of his ships ended up in the hands of the Serb navy, which sent Nassar a warehouse bill after the guns were impounded. He fled Beirut in 1997 after a Lebanese court demanded he explain his wealth, put at 70 million pound sterling.
Nassar was apparently already worried when he pulled his car into a petrol station in the suburbs of Sao Paolo on Friday; he had used his mobile phone to tell a friend that he was being followed by men in a car. He made a second call — telling his friend that his pursuers seemed to have vanished — just before the gunman fired five bullets into his body and another seven into his wife.
Israel has denied that Hobeika, who had agreed to testify against Sharon less than 24 hours before he was killed, was murdered by its own death squads. The Lebanese authorities say the opposite. Nassar — a nephew of the former Gen. Antoine Lahd who commanded Israel’s one-time proxy, the “South Lebanon Army militia” — might have been the victim of a Brazilian mafia killing. Certainly, robbery was not the motive.
The first former right-wing Christian to be struck down was one of Hobeika’s old colleagues, Jean Ghanem, who drove his car into a tree on New Year’s Day. He died after being in a coma for two weeks. Then came Hobeika’s murder and now Nassar’s.
Other former Phalangists live in fear of their lives, either from Israel or from Palestinians seeking revenge for the 1982 massacre in which up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered.
One of them recently said that dozens of Palestinians who survived the massacres were executed at a former barracks near Jounieh, north of the capital, after being held in containers for two weeks.
The prisoners had been handed over to the Phalangists, he said, by Israeli troops at the ruined sports stadium in Beirut.
Navy report shows polar cap is shrinking fast
Maritime military may soon face challenge of dealing with new ocean
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: March 9, 2002)
The polar ice cap has been shrinking so fast that regular ships may be steaming through the Northwest Passage each summer by 2015, and along northern Russia even sooner, according to a new U.S. Navy report.
Global warming will open the Arctic Ocean to unprecedented commercial activity. The seasonal expansion of open water may draw commercial fishing fleets into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska within a few decades. The summer ice cover could even disappear entirely by 2050 -- or be concentrated around northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island.
For the U.S. Navy, this presents an unprecedented challenge: a new ocean.
The nation's maritime military does not yet have the ships, training, technology and logistics in place to patrol or police a wide-open polar sea, according to the final report from a symposium on Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic.
As a result, the Navy needs to start planning now on how to deal with it, said Dennis Conlon, program manager of high latitude dynamics at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va.
For example, the ice "canopy" that now hides U.S. submarines will disappear, while opening the surface to marine operations by rival navies, criminals or even terrorists.
"We all live in a yellow submarine"
"in days" (NewScientist)
12 March 2002
The chemical and environmental dangers of the heavy metal are set out in a new report - both civilians and soldiers could be affected.
Ooch. I didn't realise they used the stuff in commercial airliners. Is it just an easy way to dispose of unwanted nuclear waste? It's like now we wait for the 'WTC syndrome'.
When Roman rule ended in Britain, military units on Hadrian’s Wall seized control of local areas for themselves.
Tony Wilmott
How did the late 4th century Roman diocese of Britannia evolve into the patchwork of kingdoms in Britain in the 6th century? Evidence for the period - traditionally, the start of the 'Dark Ages' - is sparse. Yet archaeologists are beginning to see a few signposts in the gloom.
From being a relatively uniform Roman province, Britain began to develop and change in different ways in different areas. In the South-East, for example, there seems to have been fairly rapid Anglo-Saxon takeover. In the West, where Iron Age hillforts were reoccupied as strongholds and settlements, Anglo-Saxon culture was slower to take hold. Much of this is as we would expect.
One of the more interesting areas to look at is the military zone of the North - Hadrian's Wall and its surrounding area. Here, archaeological work over recent years has brought a dramatic shift in our understanding of how society changed in the late Roman and post-Roman periods.
The principal sites to have received archaeological attention are the forts and their associated civilian settlements or vici. Fifteen years ago it was remarked how seldom evidence for later occupation had been found in forts. Archaeologists assumed that the forts were completely abandoned and that - in the words of Breeze and Dobson's classic study, Hadrian's Wall - 'the army of the Wall melted back into the soil from which it had sprung'.
That view has now been overturned by recent excavations at places such as Birdoswald, South Shields, Vindolanda, Wallsend, Housesteads and Binchester.
The static frontier troops of the late Roman army, the so-called limitanei, were supplied and paid, either in cash or in kind, by centralised authority. Recent excavations have supported this view with 4th century barracks at Vindolanda, Wallsend and South Shields recalling those of the 2nd century, if for a smaller unit strength.
The commanding officer's quarters at South Shields, Binchester, and possibly Lanchester, Housesteads and Vindolanda are larger and more elaborate in the 4th century than in earlier times. These residences may reflect an extension of the authority of unit commanders into civil as well as military spheres. They may, for example, have become civil magistrates in addition to military commanders, as their contemporaries did in provinces such as Egypt.
The principal role of these officers was to raise men and supplies, as part of the regime of local taxation - indeed, the financial and social burden of the army's presence may partly explain why Romanisation did not take hold in the North as elsewhere in Britain. It is likely that the army provided the only cash employment in the area, in both army service and in contracts for supplies. So what happened when the imperial system which sustained the army ceased to exist in Britain?
Some interesting evidence exists in the structural remains at forts from the very end of the Roman period. A number of buildings, at Vindolanda, South Shields, Housesteads and Birdoswald, have been claimed as Christian churches, largely on account of their having semi-circular apses. Vindolanda provides the firmest evidence, where in addition to the 'church' a number of Christian-looking artefacts have been found, including a stone slab incised with crosses and a 5th century tombstone of Christian type. Although Christianity was the official religion of the late Roman Empire, the apsidal buildings at Vindolanda and South Shields lay within the former military HQ buildings suggesting that they had gone out of use.
Renewed defences
The defences of three Hadrian's Wall forts, Birdoswald, Vindolanda, and Housesteads, were refurbished, but in earth and timber, rather than stone. At Birdoswald and South Shields, there are identical traces of some kind of timber rebuilding of fort gates. At South Shields this can be dated to the very late 4th or early 5th century, as the rebuilding followed the backfilling of a defensive ditch which had itself been cut after a coin of 388-402 found its way into the ground.
Birdoswald, which I excavated in 1987-92, has produced a sequence of activity which clearly continues beyond the time of circulation of some of the latest Roman pottery and coins. The southern granary was reused in a way which required a large hearth at one end of a long rectangular building. High status finds - a gold earring, a jet ring and a late 4th/early 5th century Theodosian silver coin were found around this hearth. This suggests the type of hall building found in other sub-Roman contexts such as at South Cadbury hillfort in Somerset or Doon Hill near Dunbar. The implication is that high status individuals enjoyed the best seat, nearest the fire.
The reuse of the granary was followed by two phases of timber buildings, each phase including one building of hall size, and two or three smaller structures which might be service buildings. Unfortunately these are not dateable. Reckoning some 25 years for each timber building might give us a date around 480 for the end of the sequence, but longer and shorter sequences are possible. What is clear, however, is that the transformation of the late Roman into the post-Roman period witnessed a major change in the organisation of buildings, with the evolution of the Roman commander into what seems like a Dark Age chief.
The same evolution can be found at Binchester, where the bath-house of the commander's residence, which was built after about 360, changed radically in function and status. Some rooms became a smithy and a slaughterhouse. This was followed by a period of midden dumping, and finally the site became a wooden structure used for the working of antler. Late 4th century building activity (which probably runs well into the 5th century) can also be seen at Catterick and Carlisle - two of the main towns of the region.
The problem in dating, and understanding, the sequence of change revolves around the lack of 5th century finds. All of the pottery, coins, and objects found in the latest phases of activity are of late Roman form and are 'residual' - that is, they are not necessarily contemporary with the contexts where they were found. We cannot know how long they continued in use, or whether they were actually deposited a great deal later than their manufacture.
No cash, no wages
By the late Roman period, military pay had become inconsequential in value, and the main cash receipts of the soldiers were precious metal donatives, such as gold coins minted on imperial occasions such as accessions and jubilees. Coinage becomes rare on military sites before the end of the 4th century, with coins of 388-402 very uncommon indeed. It is possible, as Richard Brickstock of Durham University has suggested, that the civilian population of the area hoarded small coinage to buy gold, against a future requirement to pay taxes in gold. Possible evidence of this was found in the form of a gold solidus in the concrete floor of a town house at Carlisle (the coin seems to have been accidentally dropped into the wet concrete - a huge financial loss).
Some archaeologists, such as Martin Millett of Cambridge University, have argued that the end of Roman administration in Britain was the result of a revolt of an elite who resented paying taxes for an imperial system which no longer supported their needs. As the provincial landowners and city governments took the reigns of power, the money economy which existed in large part to provide the cash resources to pay taxes ceased to exist. We must assume that the army, the most visible consumer of the fruits of taxation, ceased to be paid and supplied.
Pottery production and use ends at the same time as coinage. By the end of the 4th century the major producers of Crambeck and calcite-gritted wares supplied some 90 per cent of the pottery needs of the military zone, possibly through a system of military contracts. There is no stylistic change in the material after about 370 and, as pottery specialist Jerry Evans has pointed out, no pottery has been found in contexts post-dating the latest coins.
The specialised and centralised pottery industries needed a market economy within which coin circulated. After the soldiers ceased to be paid in cash such an economy no longer existed, and the end of the pottery industries followed inevitably. The surviving population, who had relied (as we do today) on buying their pottery from mass-producers, were simply unable to make pottery themselves. No doubt they reverted to using organic materials, such as wood and leather, for their domestic implements, which have not survived.
Evidence suggests that the late 4th/early 5th centuries saw radical change in personal ornaments too, in clothing fashions, and in tools. Finds specialist Hilary Cool has examined assemblages of objects of this period from across Britain, concluding that broadly similar changes took place across the country. The number of hair-pins, for example, becomes very small. It has been suggested that this might reflect the influence of Christianity in its recorded disapproval of elaborate hairstyles. The use of bracelets changes, with copper alloy dominating for most of the 4th century but bone bracelets coming in towards the end of the century and beyond.
A particular type of green cylindrical glass bead also appears more often in the later 4th century, being found in association with bone bracelets in several graves (most of these in the South). At the same time, there seems to be a rise in the use of jet finger rings. Intriguingly, a glass ring from Birdoswald is dark enough to appear black. There is a trend towards a greater number of small penannular brooches during this period than previously. In short, people began to wear different things from 20 years or so before, preferring simpler means of personal decoration and dark coloured jewellery. To a visitor from abroad, people in Britain would have looked different after the end of the Roman period compared to before.
Among other classes of find, knives seem to outnumber more specialised tools by the end of the 4th century, a reversal of the mid-4th century situation. This might reflect either a reduction in the variety of craft skills available, or an increase in the value of iron following the end of mass production. When iron was in short supply, it probably made more sense to turn it into knives - which can be used for a wide variety of tasks - than into chisels, awls, adzes and other more specialised items of kit.
People also began to show a greater urge for recycling. Counters used for gaming, and spindle whorls used in textile manufacture began to be made increasingly from reused (and much earlier) red Samian pottery, trimmed and pierced to fit their new uses.
Although hard to date precisely, the changes seem to be taking place in the last quarter - even the last half - of the 4th century. At Birdoswald, the large fort granaries went out of use about 350 and were never rebuilt. The implication may be that a system of regular local supply in kind had replaced supply by military contracts, and that large stockpiles were no longer acquired.
Protection payments
We are beginning to see that it was a long transition from late Roman to post-Roman - which was not entirely bound up with, but was hastened by, the occurrences of the first decade of the 5th century when the Romans officially withdrew from Britain.
At Birdoswald, I would argue that the only change in the early 5th century was that the troops of the fort were no longer paid or supplied by central authority. The unit was still there, however, and - drawing on the ideas of John Casey - I suggest that the old system of official coercion might have been replaced by a symbiosis, whereby the territory from which supplies had been drawn as part of the Roman tax system continued to sustain the fort in return for the assurance of protection in troubled times.
It may be that the kind of commander-patronus attested by the large commanders' houses in the late forts continued to be an important figure as the 5th century went on. These men may have been of sufficient influence to become imperceptibly more like chieftains in control of warbands than Roman commanders. Such an idea would explain the use of the hall as a centre to the settlement. Birdoswald may have become the centre of a small petty kingdom indistinguishable from others with totally different antecedents north of the Wall, or to the west of Britain.
Some of these successor settlements perhaps had a much longer life than others. Catterick may be a candidate for longevity, as may Corbridge - both also the probable centres of petty kingdoms. South Shields, however, shows no evidence at all for 5th century continuity. Early 5th century burials within the elaborate courtyard house in the fort may in fact point to a violent end. It is probable that this was related to the position of South Shields on the coast, vulnerable to the threat of attack from the eastern ocean.
Tony Wilmott is a Senior Archaeologist at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology . His book, 'The Late Roman Transition in the North', written with Pete Wilson, was recently published by BAR at £25.00.
March 2, 2002.
If you look hard enough, it's possible to find a group of ardent souls, somewhere, who still believe almost any weird idea that might ever have held currency. The Flat Earth Society, for instance, is still very much in business, with headquarters both in America and what they'd hesitate to call the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia. There are groups of people, after all this time, who still think Japanese anime is edgy and avant-garde, and others still devoted to proving that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. Perhaps you know some of these people, or are one of them. For my part, I believe the Shakespeare-authorship thing. I think Christopher Marlowe might've written all the Bard's works instead, and it was Michael Rubbo's new video documentary, "Much Ado About Something," which just completed a two-week run at Film Forum in New York and should appear somewhere near you soon, that smashed my paradigm.
The film is about the so-called Marlovians, the folks who say that Marlowe was the guy, as opposed to Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, et al. Or, for that matter, the rustic actor named William Shakespeare who commonly holds the laurels. Rubbo is an Australian filmmaker best known for the 1974 Castro documentary "Waiting for Fidel." He started out wanting to document the Marlovian apostasy because of all the interesting characters involved (they might as well have been flat-earthers instead). He entered intrigued, but as a skeptic -- and was swayed.
Indeed, something odd seems to be ado, Shakespeare-wise: Mark Rylance, the somewhat dashing, hat-affecting artistic director of the Globe Theatre, speaks lavishly on-camera on how he thinks it was really Marlowe. Jonathan Bate, probably Britain's leading orthodox Shakespeare scholar, appears all postmodern-unflappable in the film but helped award it a major prize and blurbs it in the press.
But back to my paradigm. Pre-Rubbo, I used to think the same as most semi-educated people about the Shakespeare-authorship controversy: that everyone knows the guy wrote his own stuff and we can totally prove it and it isn't really a controversy at all but part of a common urge to find conspiracies all over the place. There are lots of people out there, for instance, who believe in a secret government conspiracy to create hypnotically programmed killers, like in "The Manchurian Candidate." Of course, that actually happened -- it was called MK Ultra and was, fortunately, unsuccessful, otherwise there might've been a rash of assassinations by lone, deranged gunmen beginning in the early '60s -- and there's the rub: "Conspiracy theory" is a scare term, but real conspiracies happen all the time, especially wherever you find spies and government dirty-tricks bureaus. If they're doing their jobs right, it's sometimes very hard to tell where facts leave off and the conspiracy-nut surmise begins.
Rubbo's film shows that Her Majesty's Secret Service (the original, Elizabeth I version) might have been involved in the Shakespeare thing up to their Elizabethan ruffs. While "Much Ado About Something" begins by showing the Marlovians as harmless eccentrics, mostly of the English Miss Marple and Colonel Mustard variety, it also shows them as holding that rarest of patents in the conspiracy-buff field -- an idea that keeps looking more compelling the further you get into it.
Read on...
John Lloyd Monday 11th March 2002
Who would have expected Hitchens, Amis and Rushdie to support a Republican president in a war? But John Lloyd finds sense and logic in their stand.
"I had," said Martin Amis, "been a bit more cautious about the war to begin with. I thought that the old response, with the cruise missiles operation, was not right. I thought it should be more of a financial and an intelligence operation. But it now seems to me that a show of force was necessary."
Prominent writers, such as Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie, have shocked some sections of the European left by their stance on 11 September and on the events that followed it. The shock is all the greater because, like Amis, they come from a left generation that bitterly opposed US intervention, overt and covert, in such countries as Vietnam and Chile. Much of the intellectual left in Europe cleaves to a view of America as the largest danger in the modern world. It sees those from the '68 generation as supportive of a Republican president - and thinks that, since they regard terrorists as enemies just as Bush does, these writers should be damned as heretics. Their reasons are barely attended to.
For Hitchens, more than Amis, the war appears to have sharpened his thinking on the nature of the divisions in the world. Speaking from his home in Washington, Hitchens said: "I do think America is a great idea. I think the American revolution is the only one which has lasted, the only one left. It still has a dynamic. It is the only one capable of a universal application." I said that this brought him close to the position of Francis Fukuyama, in his End of History and the Last Man - that the values derived from the American revolution represent the highest achievement of political economy and that there can now be no credible challenge to them. "A much underrated writer," said Hitchens.
His concern, after 11 September, was not that the US would lead a war on terrorism, but that it would fail to do so. "I had a real fear," Hitchens said, "that the Bush people wouldn't fight. Even later, I thought that the 'axis of evil' phrase [used by President George Bush in his State of the Union address] could be a way of changing the subject."
Both Amis and, more polemically, Hitchens believe that the war has exposed a division in Europe's left: between the decent left, which is on the side of those willing to fight Islamic fascism, and the rigidly anti-American left. The latter is willing to push all else aside in order to give free way to a refurbished critique of imperialism, in which the US plays the dominant role, dragging servile satraps such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder and Vladimir Putin in its wake.
Rushdie - who, like Amis and Hitchens, now lives in the US - wrote in the Guardian a month ago that "America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm".
Rushdie said that, on a recent visit to the UK, he was "struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media . . . The attacks on America are routinely discounted ('Americans only care about their own dead'). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues." Hitchens, on a visit to the UK last month, expected leftist scorn, but was less prepared for the reaction from other quarters. "I did one phone-in show and it became quite obvious that people in the upper social echelon thought that the US was being too self-righteous."
The American left - powerful in intellectual, cultural and media circles, if not in politics - is either for the war, or silent, according to Hitchens. An exception to this is Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, who sees in the war a new chapter in a long work of US imperialism and racism. "Chomsky is just plain wrong," said Martin Amis, speaking from Ecuador, where he has been writing a book on communism which has clearly caused him to refine his world-view. "The moral equivalence line just didn't work, I thought. Anti-Americanism doesn't impress me as a very rational position."
Amis has not become a man of the right. Neither has Hitchens or Rushdie. They have simply remained capable of discriminating between positions. Hitchens sees in the right a major strain of realpolitik, most closely associated with Henry Kissinger, whom he branded a war criminal in a book published last year. (A French magistrate made an effort, which came to nothing, to take that seriously and have Kissinger arrested on a visit to Paris.)
That school of thought - of which the first President Bush was a prominent exponent - sees national interest as the major determinant for US intervention in foreign wars: a view that would have prevented the United States, or Nato, from engaging in any African war, or in Bosnia, or in Kosovo. "The first time I had a public quarrel with Chomsky," Hitchens said, "was over Bosnia. He was helping to provide a smokescreen for Milosevic. The thing is, in the end, Chomsky doesn't think the US is a good idea."
The emerging left position on human rights was put powerfully in the most recent edition of the New York Review of Books by Samantha Power, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Power points out that genocide, far from being confined to the age of the Nazis and the Stalinists, has flourished in the past half-century in such countries as Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda, and has gone largely unpunished.
"Genocide occurred after the cold war," she writes, "after the growth of human rights groups; after the advent of technology that allowed for instant communication; after the erection of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC."
Modest progress has been made in trying to stop genocide. With his "ethical dimension to foreign policy", Robin Cook, foreign secretary until last year, tried to grapple with precisely the conditions that Power describes - where governments know what is happening and where they have the power to act to stop or moderate slaughter. Sporadically, Labour's senior people grappled with what "ethics" could mean. They faced bureaucratic scepticism, and the scorn of "realists" such as Kissinger, who thought both Blair and Bill Clinton naive.
In a speech in Chicago in April 1999, while the war in Kosovo ran on, Blair said that "the most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts . . . the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter."
But the "most pressing problem" had received no answer by 11 September. Powerful states, notably the US and China, see sovereignty as a non-negotiable right - the US, to the point of refusing to accede to the International Criminal Court lest a US soldier or official be brought to trial in a foreign jurisdiction. One of the many contradictions of the transatlantic relationship is that the UK, supposedly the closest of the European allies to the US, is in this regard the furthest from it.
The events of 11 September "solved" the issue of intervention, providing a justification for US counterstrikes which almost all members of the UN initially recognised. It is, however, a temporary solution: nothing has been written into international law, or UN practice, that gives sanction to larger interventions, especially those undertaken without the moral force provided by a prior strike. Blair's speeches, notably to last autumn's Labour conference, on the need for a much more active policy - through aid programmes and state-building as well as through military intervention - have met only uncertain responses, in the UK as elsewhere.
Those regimes that use the paraphernalia and practices of fascism have now at least to contend with the belief, admittedly still fragile, that they should be opposed because, sooner or later, they will cause mass murders at home or abroad or both. The 11 September attacks, Power writes, "might make Americans inside and outside government more empathetic toward the victims of genocide". It is to the credit of the UK government that it has tried to build such empathy. It is to the shame of much of the European left that it has tried to brand such empathy as wickedness. "It would be easy," writes Rushdie, "for America, in the present climate of hostility . . . to start . . . throwing its weight around without regard for the concerns of what it perceives as an already hostile world." Amis says that "the US before 11 September behaved more unilaterally than before the Second World War. That's very strongly there in this administration. If they think they've found a model from their successes in Afghanistan, then I think they're wrong."
Hitchens makes the danger more precise. It is that the impetus to combat tyrannous or genocidal regimes proceeds not from the stated aims - to stop ethnic cleansing or to shore up popular opposition - but merely to suppress threats to the west, especially to the US. He points to the neglect of the long-established Iraqi opposition groups by the White House, and the administration's apparent insouciance about planning to assist a replacement government that could gather popular support and attempt reconciliation with neighbours. "Clinton ran for office saying that stopping massacres would be his responsibility. They ratted on commitments."
But Hitchens sees, among the generation whose most active spirits were far leftists, "a new politics" of engagement emerging, pointed up by such figures as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. It is a politics that at least promises to redefine national interest to include the halt of mass murder. The left, instead of dismissing all actions and rhetoric of Bush, Blair and Schroder as those of hypocritical imperialists, should hold these leaders to their words. If, as the left has long believed, genocide, oppression and aggression should be fought, its task is to ensure that politicians who endorse these aims live up to them.
Tuesday, 21 August, 2001.
Development plans for Tibet include the world's highest railway
Chinese geologists are reported to have discovered a vast oil deposit in a remote part of northern Tibet.
The oil deposit in the Qiangtan Basin extends over 100 kilometres (60 miles) and may hold as much as 100 million tonnes of oil, according the official Xinhua news agency.
The Tibetan Government in Exile is very concerned about current projects for major exploitation of oil and gas reserves in Tibet by Petro China, in partnership with western companies such as BP, Enron, and AGIP. These projects, as they are now conceived,will cause harm to the Tibetan people. We therefore call for an immediate halt to the construction of the Sebei-Lanzhou (Amdo) pipeline and the increases in exploration for oil & gas on the Tibetan plateau.
The Tibetan Government-in-Exile position with respect to development and investment in Tibet is clear: it supports projects which benefit the Tibetan people and opposes those which cause harm to them. We have put forward a set of Guidelines for International Development Projects and Sustainable Investment in Tibet to assists potential investors, corporations and donor agencies interested in working in Tibet to determine what projects should be encouraged and which ones should be discouraged and opposed. The main goal of the Guidelines is to foster sustainable development in the Tibetan Plateau that will enhance the ability of the Tibetan people to fully participate in the development of their land and to control their natural resources.
Thus, projects that empower Tibetans, improve their education, provide appropriate employment for Tibetans, protect the natural environment, promote Tibetan culture, national identity and language besides improving the living conditions of Tibetans can be useful. On the other hand, projects that facilitate the transfer of Chinese into Tibetan areas, employ sizeable numbers of Chinese, deplete natural resources in Tibet, transfer ownership of land to non-Tibetans, facilitate erosion of Tibetan culture and identity, and perpetrate the economic marginalization of Tibetans in Tibetan areas are clearly harmful and should be stopped. Clearly, under the present circumstances not all development projects in Tibet are in the best interest of the Tibetans. Hence, we urge all the foreign corporations and investors involved in economic development projects in Tibet to examine their activities carefully in light of these Guidelines. Projects that adversely effect Tibetan society and environment must be immediately stopped and redesigned or canceled.
At this point in time the construction of the Sebei-Lanzhou (Tsaidam, Amdo) oil and gas pipeline, launched on 30 March 2000, backed by western companies such as BP, Enron, and AGIP, is causing alarm among Tibetans. This project represents a significant escalation of China's exploitation of oil and gas on the Tibetan Plateau and will accelerate China's policy of transferring Chinese settlers into Tibetan areas. With the involvement of western companies China receives global support in despoiling Tibet's natural resources for the first time. In the view of the Tibetan Government-In-Exile, this project will be harmful because it will:
-Employ a sizeable and disproportionate number of Chinese and other non-Tibetans.
-Deplete natural resources with little or no benefit to the Tibetan people.
-Consolidate the Chinese control and occupation of Tibet as well as increase the Chinese government's reasons for maintaining control.
-Facilitate the erosion of Tibetan culture and traditions.
-Facilitate the transfer of Chinese settlers or workers to Tibetan areas.
-Negatively affect the sustainability of Tibet's ecosystems.
Employ only a few Tibetans in unskilled labour positions.
Similarly, increases in drilling for oil and gas currently planned for the Tsaidam basin area of Amdo are also problematic. Such projects are being promoted by China as part of Beijing's planned "Western Development" campaign. Foreign corporations participating in this campaign as it affects Tibet are hereby requested to ensure that their projects are in compliance with the Guidelines set forth by the Tibetan Government-In-Exile. If there is any doubt or confusion, it is the Tibetan Government-In-Exile which shall serve as the final arbiter.
Our successful campaign against the World Bank's funding for Dulan Project should not be interpreted to mean that the Tibetan Government In Exile is against any kind of involvement in Tibet. We successfully opposed the Dulan Project because the project, as it was designed, would have been very harmful to Tibetans. The World Bank would effectively have financed China's population transfer policy. The Tibetan Government in Exile does not oppose projects and investments that are beneficial to Tibetans. However, this can only be the case if projects meet the principles set out in the Guidelines.
Given the harmful effects of the gas and oil extraction projects on the Tibetan plateau, BP, AGIP, and Enron are hereby requested to immediately halt the construction of the Sebei to Lanzhou pipeline, and the increases in drilling for oil & gas on the Tibetan plateau. These corporations are further urged to withdraw investments from Chinese entities engaged in these activities, as a way of ensuring that the destruction of the Tibetan environment and the disenfranchisement of the Tibetan people does not proceed with Western support.
These investments are clearly harmful to Tibetans and will be actively opposed.
Kalon T.C. Tethong
Minister
Department of Information and International Relations
September 22, 2000
February 25, 2002
By Jeffrey Blankfort, Anne Poirier
and Steve Zeltzer
Plaintiffs in the of ADL Spying Case
In 1993, the District of Attorney of San Francisco released 700 pages of documents implicating the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that claims to be a defender of civil rights, in a vast spying operation directed against American citizens who were opposed to Israel's policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information to both governments.
Under great political pressure, Smith later dropped the charges. One wonders what would have happened had an Arab-American or Muslim organization been caught spying with the names of 10,000 people and 600 organizations in their files.
Not only were critics of Israel under ADL's surveillance,including thousands of Arab-Americans, but labor organizations such as the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, and the Oakland Educational Association, and civil rights groups such as the NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council and the Asian Law Caucus were also found in the "pinko" files of ADL's undercover operative, Roy Bullock.
Moreover, Bullock, who had worked, off the books, for the ADL for more than 25 years, admitted that he had been reporting on the activities of black South African exiles and American anti- apartheid activists for South African intelligence.
Bullock, pretending to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, came to the founding meeting of the Labor Committee of the Middle in 1987 at the home of plaintiff Steve Zeltzer, having met Zeltzer at meetings of the Free Moses Mayekiso Defense
Committee, a South African labor solidarity committee in which he also infiltrated under false pretenses.
Having been responsible for exposing Bullock as an ADL agent to the media, we joined together with other Bay Area activists in filing a suit against the ADL for violation of our privacy rights as provided in California law.
Almost a decade later the suit has been settled with a significant cash payment by the ADL and, we wish to emphasize, without our signing any agreement for confidentiality which the ADL had previously demanded. Our efforts to expose the organization's work in defending the policies of the Israeli government and stifling its opponents will continue, using new information gained in the pursuance of the suit.
The ADL spent millions of dollars preventing this case from coming to trial through costly appeals and exploiting the judicial process but, at the end, it had to give up..
During the course of the suit we learned that:
Bullock, the ADL's top "fact finder" had sold confidential information to a South African intelligence agent in San Francisco for $15,000.
Ten days before he was assassinated in South Africa, Chris Hani, the man who would have succeeded Nelson Mandela as the country's president, was trailed by Bullock on a trip through California who reported on it to the South African government.
ADL agent Roy Bullock was discovered to have a floor plan of murdered Los Angeles Arab American leader Alex Odeh and a key to his office.
The ADL supplied confidential information to foreign governments that it obtained from police and federal agencies in the US.
Having infiltrated the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the ADL's "fact finder" performed a COINTEL-type operation at the convention of the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review when he put ADC's literature on convention tables as a way of smearing the committee for "working with anti- Semites."
The ADL has organized to silence and eliminate all critical voices of Israel from academia and the media and has targeted professors , particularly those who are African American, and who are critical of Israel.
That at least 51% of the activities of its San Francisco office were devoted to defending Israel.
The ADL provided secret files to police agencies when these police agencies were prevented by law from collecting the files themselves,
Many questions must still be answered about the activities of the ADL and it's non-profit status as an "education organization". The settlement offered by the ADL is recognition on its part that it could not afford to go to a trial in front of a jury and face the likelihood that more of its dirty secrets would be revealed.
We call on all people to make sure that these practices on the part of the ADL are not allowed to continue and that the double standard that presently dominates this country on issues dealing with Israel be eliminated.
Finally, we wish to thank our attorney, former congressman Pete McCloskey, himself a victim of the ADL and the Israel Lobby, for his years of work on our behalf and his steadfast commitment to the pursuit of justice.
The Discovery:1958-1960
In the spring of 1958 Smith, then a graduate student in Theology at Columbia University, was invited to catalogue the manuscript holdings in the library of the Mar Saba monastery, located twelve miles south of Jerusalem. Smith had been a guest of the same hermitage years earlier, when he was stranded in Palestine by the conflagrations of the second World War.
What Smith found during his task in the tower library surprised him. He discovered some new scholia of Sophocles, for instance, and dozens of other manuscripts.[2] Despite these finds, however, the beleaguered scholar soon resigned himself to what looked like a reasonable conclusion: he would find nothing of major importance at Mar Saba. His malaise evaporated one day as he first deciphered the manuscript that would always thereafter be identified with him:
[. . . O]ne afternoon near the end of my stay, I found myself in my cell, staring incredulously at a text written in a tiny scrawl. [. . . I]f this writing was what it claimed to be, I had a hitherto unknown text by a writer of major significance for early church history.[3]
What Smith then began photographing was a three-page handwritten addition penned into the endpapers of a printed book, Isaac Voss' 1646 edition of the Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.[4] It identified itself as a letter by Clement of the Stromateis, i.e., Clement of Alexandria, the second-century church father well-known for his neo-platonic applications of Christian belief. Clement writes "to Theodore," congratulating him for success in his disputes with the Carpocratians, an heterodoxical sect about which little is known. Apparently in their conflict with Theodore, the Carpocratians appealed to Mark's gospel.
Clement responds by recounting a new story about the Gospel. After Peter's death, Mark brought his original gospel to Alexandria and wrote a "more spiritual gospel for the use of those who were being perfected." Clement says this text is kept by the Alexandrian church for use only in the initiation into "the great mysteries."
However, Carpocrates the heretic, by means of magical stealth, obtained a copy and adapted it to his own ends. Because this version of the "secret" or "mystery" gospel had been polluted with "shameless lies," Clement urges Theodore to deny its Markan authorship even under oath. "Not all true things are to be said to all men," he advises.
Theodore has asked questions about particular passages of the special Carpocratian Gospel of Mark, and by way of reply Clement transcribes two sections which he claims have been distorted by the heretics. The first fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark, meant to be inserted between Mark 10.34 and 35, reads:
They came to Bethany. There was one woman there whose brother had died. She came and prostrated herself before Jesus and spoke to him. "Son of David, pity me!" But the disciples rebuked her. Jesus was angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Immediately a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going up to it, Jesus rolled the stone away from the door of the tomb, and immediately went in where the young man was. Stretching out his hand, he lifted him up, taking hold his hand. And the youth, looking intently at him, loved him and started begging him to let him remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus gave him an order and, at evening, the young man came to him wearing nothing but a linen cloth. And he stayed with him for the night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And then when he left he went back to the other side of the Jordan.
Then a second fragment of Secret Mark is given, this time to be inserted into Mark 10.46. This has long been recognized as a narrative snag in Mark's Gospel, as it awkwardly reads, "Then they come to Jericho. As he was leaving Jericho with his disciples..." This strange construction is not present in Secret Mark, which reads:
Then he came into Jericho. And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there with his mother and Salome, but Jesus would not receive them.
Just as Clement prepares to reveal the "real interpretation" of these verses to Theodore, the copyist discontinues and Smith's discovery is, sadly, complete.
Smith stopped briefly in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to share his discovery with Gerschom Scholem. He then returned to America where he sought the opinions of his mentors Erwin Goodenough and Arthur Darby Nock. "God knows what you've got hold of," Goodenough said.[6] "They made up all sorts of stuff in the fifth century," said Nock. "But, I say, it is exciting."
read on..
I'm sure there's many Catholic Priests who'd very much support the addition of these passages.
Red-Eared Slider Is 40 Years Old
Posted: 1:45 p.m. EST March 4, 2002
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Mike Conley was about 8 when his parents bought him a 49-cent drug-store turtle. The half-dollar-size reptile was a popular pet of the day.
And 40 years later, Tiger the turtle could be the world's oldest Red-eared Slider. He still lives with Conley's parents in Overland Park.
The herpetologist-emeritus at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Joseph Collins, said the record for the oldest Slider had been 37 years, 9 months and 10 days.
He said it's pretty amazing that Tiger has lived that long.
Conley is now 47 and lives in Dallas. He still checks on Tiger when he visits his parents at their suburban Kansas City, Kan., home.
Tiger has grown to measure about 10 inches long by 8 inches wide and now calls a metal washtub home.
(from Bartcop.com)
The arrest of FBI agent Richard P. Hanssen is a another bad FBI cover story. It also seems to be a poorly crafted media stunt.
When you think about it, what kind of a crime could they prove against him?
In the FBI's own counterintelligence protocols for a controlled drop, which was to get evidence to use in court, they're supposed to wait until the suspect, in this case Hanssen, has not only dropped the documents but the surveillance team is supposed to wait until his Russian handlers come to get them, so they can be arrested as well. Since this was a double dead drop site, which means that the money was at a different location than the papers, the FBI should have waited for the suspect to go and collect the money.
What the FBI did, however, is videotape the suspect so all they had was a video of Hanssen walking into a public restroom in the middle of the woods in Virginia. They have a picture of him walking in. He has no papers in his hand. No briefcase. No containers. Nothing. Then the minute he walks out, the FBI arrest him. The FBI then goes back to the mens room. In the trash barrel they find a milk container stuffed full of classified documents. But they don't videotape it. Then the video doesn't start rolling again until Hanssen is in the back seat of the car. You can't really see him.
Then the FBI is seen taking apart the milk carton on the hood of the car, so they don't even have any taped evidence to back up their claim that classified documents were in the trash barrel.
So how do they prove that Hanssen even put them there? Secondly, how does the FBI prove motive?
They didn't wait to tape him going to the second site to pick the money. Instead the FBI picked up the money ahead of time. Then they used the same money to show on TV, part of the display presentation for the media. Here's the money Hanssen supposedly got, and they show the $50,000 in hundred dollar bills. The problem is Hanssen never got that money. It was never in his hands.
The whole thing was nebulous -- even the way FBI Director Louis Freeh described it. Freeh himself wasn't even clear as to what he was saying when he stated that the FBI suddenly and mysteriously ended up with KGB documents directly from Russia from a "friendly source." And that supposedly turned them on to Hanssen?
No Russian intelligence officer would have any vested interest in giving documents to the FBI -- not unless they were sold. And if the FBI had bought them. But that would be another matter altogether. The FBI says they didn't buy them, that no money changed hands.
Could it be that this was a manipulation by both the CIA and the Russian Federal Intelligence Service to perhaps prevent Hanssen's Russian handlers from being videotaped?
Is it possible that one of these so-called Russian handlers is actually working for the CIA?
Or could it be that it's one of the CIA people involved in the Hanssen Affair behind the scenes?
The only way that the FBI would have gotten these documents would be if the CIA had been involved. They absolutely could not have gotten the documents otherwise.
Or could it be the other way around? Could the Russians be attempting to protect somebody in the CIA? It could work both ways.
When Freeh was being questioned after his press conference, some of the reporters were smart enough to know that what Feeeh was saying wasn't making any sense. When Freeh was through with his explanation and the reporters started asking him questions, Freeh couldn't even remember what he had just said 40 minutes ago.
So there he was -- shuffling through papers, looking for the answers. This was the official FBI press conference on the arrest. Surprisingly enough, they didn't show Hanssen going in to place the documents allegedly there. They did show a color still shot of the men's room in the middle of the woods with nobody else in it. All the rest was simply oral representation.
If you think back to the Walker Case, the Pell Case, or the Howard Case, you'll find they show the videotapes of everything right up front, during the press conference. Because they have nothing to hide. And they want to poison the atmosphere against the alleged suspect.
And the Hanssen Affair? There's something very wrong. The FBI was very nebulous. When Freeh was asked about Hanssen being questioned the night before, he said that Hanssen didn't say anything. Then five minutes later, Freeh said that Hanssen revealed how much money he had received. Then they changed the statement again and said that No, he hadn't revealed that.
How did the FBI know how much money he had received? They searched all his bank statements and couldn't find it. The FBI admitted that. They said they searched all his financial records over the last fifteen years and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary.
The first statement was that it was $600,000. Initially the FBI said it was $1.4 million. Then they said it was $600,000 in cash and $800,000 in diamonds.
How could they know that? What the FBI hasn't said is that they haven't found any diamonds anywhere in any safe deposit box. How could the FBI possibly know that?
If the CIA told them, it has to be a part of an overall setup. Someone had to tell them. How could they have known that there was another $800,000 on deposit in a bank in Moscow for Hanssen? It's not even in Hanssen's name. They could not have possibly know that because Hanssen's Russian handlers didn't even know his real name, or his position in the government, or even what agency he worked for.
There are only three possibilities. Either this is a Russian setup or it's a CIA setup. Or it's some combination of the two, which gets into much more nefarious territory.
The next question is -- why isn't anyone in the mainstream media pressing the FBI or any other agency of government for answers to these glaring inconsistencies in FBI statements regarding the Hanssen Affair?
The inference is that the word is coming out of the White House telling the media that we don't want a lot of coverage on this and we don't want a lot of questions asked. That is a power that the government always has. The White House commonly exerts this pressure by threatening to revoke White House press privileges for any network that doesn't comply. This happened quite often during the Iran-Contra Affair.
Claire Shipman, the former CNN White House correspondent, went on Nightline with Ted Koppel. She was the first one to reveal that this is the way the White House pressures news organizations.
When you see this and wait for more Hanssen coverage or an explanation for these glaring discrepancies, it becomes obvious.
It's very similar to the recent case against Wen Ho Lee. The Department of Justice attempted to cobble together a case of some sort. At the same time they exerted pressure to keep judicial proceedings surrounding the case closed to the media. And they succeeded.
The Hanssen Affair seems to be an effort to cover somebody's ass -- to prevent exposure of someone, of a person unknown at this time. This would be the most plausible explanation.
What lends credence to the idea that the Hanssen Affair is a CIA deal (the CIA trying to protect someone and not the Russians) is the way the Russians acted after the arrest. They waited two days to arrest the American spy and Fulbright scholar John Edward Tobin.
By the way, the CIA has controlled the Fulbright scholarship program since the 1950s, recruiting some of its best spies from the program. Senator Fulbright sat on the Intelligence Committee years ago. Today Fulbright Jaworsky is the biggest Democratically controlled law firm in Washington.
The Associated Press story (or legend)called "Russians Arrest US Student on Drug Charge" (Feb 28, 2001) erroneously states that Tobin is a 24 year old graduate student. He would have received specialized intelligence training at age 17 ("military intelligence school training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1995-96, where he earned a certificate as an interrogation expert").
The AP article itself is hastily arranged and obviously fraught with error. It isn't any secret that for many years the CIA has used AP to leak things out that they want leaked out -- whether true or false.
The Russians acted quickly to take this American spy into custody.
Why were the Russians in such a hurry to arrest him? Why did the Russians give up their leverage and have him arrested by setting him up in a drug bust, an old KGB ploy when the Russians need a quick arrest? The Russian narcotics laws are extremely severe. Possession of a single marijuana cigarette can mandate a sentence of twenty years.
Why would the Russian Federal Security Service or FSB give up a diamond in the rough which Tobin was?
They wanted to let the Americans know that they knew about Tobin and his classified training and they hadn't even questioned him at the time. Tobin was later released.
Is it possible that Hanssen is tradeable? Is it possible that he is much more than what he appears? Is it possible that he is even complicitous somehow in setting himself up?
After all I went through that during Iran-Contra. I was told to act in a duplicitous fashion to help the FBI build a case against myself in the event that I had to be arrested, charged with a crime to maintain the deniability of those above me.
By the way, the FBI admitted that the information that Hanssen had passed to the Russians over the years was information that the Russians knew about from other sources. Why didn't the FBI do something with the information earlier? And how could the FBI have known that Hanssen was passing along information that the Russians already knew about from another source? The FBI claimed that they had received this information eighteen months earlier. Furthermore, Freeh stated that the FBI, through this information, had an "airtight case."
If that was true, why did the FBI wait eighteen months to set him up for the arrest?
The only way the FBI could have known was if the CIA had told them. Either the CIA told them or the Russians themselves told them. In either case, it stinks to high heaven.
Precipitated by this new Phony FBI Spy Story, i.e. the Hanssen Affair, it appears that the Bureau is severely disorganized and agents are very disenchanted at this point.
There's fear throughout the Bureau because agents were told, before the Hanssen Affair started, that there was something coming, and that any agents, particularly the old-timers with something to hide, had better watch out. Naturally that sent a rankle of fear through the Bureau.
If you had been with them for twenty years or more, of course, you're going to have something to hide. A lot of the older guys were moving their hush money offshore and burying the bribes that they'd gotten over the years, monies from drug busts that they had kept. It led to a quick shuffling of money and a sudden transfer of deeds to luxurious Caribbean cottages.
Furthermore FBI agents will now be expected to take frequent lie detector tests and their credit reports will also be checked frequently. The older guys find this intolerable and many are being pushed into early retirement.
It's a fact that Hanssen and his original partners were connected to Louis Freeh, currently FBI Director Louis Freeh. In fact, they all lived in the same town and attended the same church. It turns out that Freeh was an actual personal friend of Hanssen's years ago.
The FBI then set up Hanssen with virtually no evidence. Why?
N E W Y O R K, March 8 — Is recycling garbage? It's an old debate with new life now that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed an 18-month moratorium on recycling glass, plastic and aluminum in cash-strapped Gotham.
-New Policy Stirs Fears Bush Seeks to Widen War (Commondreams)
BOGOTA, Colombia -- The Cano Limon oil pipeline, which snakes almost 500 miles across northern Colombia, was once the focus of dreams for national prosperity.
But after years of sabotage bombings by leftist guerrillas, the pipeline may serve instead as the trigger for wider U.S. involvement in Colombia's 36- year civil war, some critics warn.
Earlier this month, the Bush administration announced it will ask Congress for $98 million in the 2003 budget to train, arm and provide air support for Colombian troops to defend the pipeline, which is jointly owned by the Occidental Petroleum Corp., with headquarters in Los Angeles, and the Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol.
The move marks a shift from previous U.S. policy of providing only military aid, which was reserved almost exclusively for anti-narcotics operations.
The House of Bush wants to use your local Neighborhood Crime Watch Association to act as a Big Brother surrogate.
First, the Civilian Defense Force will coordinate the so-called Local Citizen's Profiling Program, and this is where the Neighborhood Watch comes in.
They need it because they figure that these are people from the community, who have lived there a long time and they know everybody. They know who's a Republican or a Democrat, who's a Christian or a Jew, and so on. They also know people's political feelings and their dispositions.
That's why the Neighborhood Watch is being used in this capacity - to begin to establish Citizen Profile sheets. It will essentially be all the usual stuff - name, date of birth, religious affiliation, political party, education, medical history, firearms ownership, memberships in organizations, etc.
Then they will gather information on whether you have protested against the government in the past, if you have been known to harbor views contrary to the "security of the State" or "injurious to the domestic tranquility of the people."
It can get a little confusing. The existing AmeriCorp Program is being divided. Half of it is going to become the Freedom Corp. It will have a political agenda, and it will receive federal money separately. The other half of AmeriCorp will be folded into the existing Peace Corp, but it will act as a domestic Peace Corp, supposedly without a political agenda.
The Freedom Corp will then join forces with Neighborhood Watch groups because they are not well organized. The new AmeriCorp will provide the manpower and materiel to organize the Neighborhood Watch organizations into a much more effective surveillance force.
It's hard to figure out how much money is being spent because of the way they keep appropriating the money. There's a $4 billion security appropriation for AmeriCorp, but they're not saying how much of it is going to each division. Then there was a $3.8 billion appropriation to effectively federalize the Neighborhood Watch Groups. Then there is a separate $15 billion for the new Civilian Defense Force.
And here's the chain of command. The Freedom Corp will be amalgamated into the Neighborhood Watch Association. It will become the senior surviving partner of the amalgamation. It will be then called Freedom Corp, and not Neighborhood Watch. They're going to expand these groups tremendously in terms of personnel, not getting more neighbors to watch out for crime, but in terms of personnel. The umbrella group is Corporation for National and Community Service.
Above this newly created entity, which works at the local level, will be a second newly created entity, the Civilian Defense Corp., which will operate by county and state chapters, but not local chapters.
The Freedom Corp will then report to the Civilian Defense Corps, which is now being set up and then will coordinate with FEMA on a state level and all other state emergency agencies and law enforcement.
The CDF is being put in for control on a state and county level. All that's known is what has been publicly stated. It will have paramilitary powers, supposedly to clean up disasters, emergencies, the next terrorist attack, etc. It also has a political agenda and it's separate and distinct from AmeriCorps.
Another political agenda of the CDF will be the control of children, marketing propaganda to children, etc. They'll have their own uniforms with badges and so on. They will start going into the nation's elementary schools to "calm the fears of children": in their own words and to further teach children the "importance of patriotism and obedience to the State."
The Civilian Defense Force, in turn, reports directly to the Office of Homeland Security. But there is an intermediary, which acts as liaison and that is the Office of Internal Security. This Office will then cull everybody who is "patriotic" -- everyone who's got a flag out in front of the house and everyone who's fat, dumb, and happy and says nice things about the "war on terrorism" and George Bush. Then what will be left is a profile of the 20% who disagree. It will be the Office of Internal Security's job to classify these to make "threat assessments" for purposes of extra-legal containment of potential dissidents and to classify said individuals on a certain scale.
At the end of that scale, there will be citizens who are considered the greatest threat (not those who own the most guns or who subscribe to nazi magazines or UFO magazines) but those who have the greatest access to the truth about what the government is doing, are hostile to what the government is doing, who have the ability to disseminate that information, and who still have varying degrees of credibility left.
They will be categorized in the last category called EOTS, or Enemies of the State. It will be the job of the Office of Internal Security to monitor and to liaise with the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA's new domestic division (which people seem to forget already). It will be the Office of Internal Security that recommends how much electronics surveillance, manpower, etc. gets devoted to every classification of "dangerous citizen" or "dissident citizen."
They will also establish "containment" methods. In other words, you can't just go out and liquidate people who have continuing access to information and who have the ability to disseminate it. They have to be "contained." In the FBI's definition, to "contain" is to surveil, harass, pressure, attempt to impede someone's ability to earn a living, discredit wherever possible, including the formulation of bogus criminal charges, and to sic other agencies like the IRS on them or, in other words, to try to bury them. This is all done under the notion that if you can prevent someone from earning a living, eventually they will become so desperate, they will do something to cross the line and you won't have to do anything to trump up charges against them. That is the key point in how you get people to discredit themselves - by impeding their ability to earn money.
Then at some point, for their own survival, they will have to enter some sort of shady transactions or shady deal. And insofar as they will be under such intense scrutiny, particularly electronic surveillance, through their computer and telephone, then Uncle's going to be waiting for them to step over the line. This is the model that the US Government has used in the post-war environment, and it has never stopped using it for the containment of internal dissidents.
And this is the real meaning of the word "dissident." It's not someone who's dangerous to the people; it's someone who's dangerous to the government. For example, the function of the FBI's COINTELPRO program of the 1960s was, not only to discredit, but to impede the ability of individuals, who were telling the truth from making money and supporting themselves. When you're trying to discredit somebody the first thing you do is try to plant a lot of false stories about them. That doesn't always work. The best type of harassment is to impede somebody's ability to earn a living, to spread rumors so that nobody else will hire them, or if they're self-employed, make sure that suddenly their corporate credit cards get knocked and suddenly no banks will extend them any more credit. If they're selling a product, the best way is to pressure the distributors of the product. This is a policy of gradual containment, until you cant get out of the box you're put in.
You can look at this with all the other ancillary security measures being undertaken. There is, for instance, a five-fold expansion in the National Security Agency's WESTAR domestic surveillance satellite system, which will increase the government's capability from monitoring 2 million phone calls simultaneously to monitoring 12 million domestic phone calls simultaneously.
Then there's the construction of the new Domestic Surveillance Hover Drones. We will need a tremendous increase in satellite communication capability. If you're going to build tens of thousands of urban hover drones that have to transmit information, you're going to need tremendous satellite capability in order to handle all the information. This will also involve the construction of new earth-bound repeater stations, another part of this $18 billion expansion in the WESTAR 7 System.
This is where it's all going - the internal security measures, setting up internal security checkpoints, which has now only begin in very sensitive installations. Then there's the establishing of internal security checkpoints at state borders for stopping public transportation. It's for people who think they can move around using the bus or interstate rail system because there will be less security restrictions and less identification processing necessary. The government already knows that and that's why they intend to set up intra-state checkpoints. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has already discussed these plans extensively in public. This is legislation, which has already been formulated and has already been passed (or will be passed) as part of the overall increase in internal transportation security. The increase in airport security is actually part of this same bill that's getting funded from this same $18 billion appropriation. There's only been about a $3 billion appropriation for the office of federal sky marshals.
A lot of this is waiting for the overturning of Posse Comitatus, after which the government will quickly move to the full and complete militarization of domestic law enforcement by establishing a fifth service branch. Historically the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in order to deny Union troops police powers in the South after the Civil War. Otherwise Union troops would have had carte blanche in looting and thieving the South. When this act is repealed, the final legal obstacle will be removed to the militarization of domestic law enforcement - which the government has already spelled out in great detail -- a domestic branch of the military, headed by a four star general who will be the literally the commanding officer of domestic law enforcement. Then there will be the transfer of the title and powers from the Attorney General's chief law enforcement officer to this General and the creation of the new Central Command in Philadelphia.
This surpasses even the Roman Command-and-Control model of government. It should be noted that Roman garrisons were not allowed within the city limits of Rome. The reason? Caesar was frightened of them. Even though Caesar had his Praetorian Guard, he didn't trust the rank and file soldiers. Thus the United States of America will be even Out-Roming Rome itself with this scheme.
The only question the government has not answered yet is how many federal troops, that is, National Guard troops or other branch reserve troops, will be committed on a permanent basis to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. So far the government has hinted at 50,000 or 65,000, but I think it will be closer to 150,000.
The militarization of law enforcement then will be in essence putting another 100,000 law enforcement people on the streets - except it will be military. To avoid permanent call-up, what they will do is rotate active duty call-ups on a 90-day basis or a 6-month basis, throughout the different service branches and the National Guard.
There won't be any standing force of foreign troops. The only provision, in all of these new acts, regarding foreign troops is the removal of the previous ban on having foreign troops engaged in military activity on US soil at the US Government's request. That was previously banned and now that ban has been removed. The only thing the Department of Defense has said is that they can ask for foreign troops if it becomes necessary to quell domestic dissent. The NATO pilots flying AWACS planes over the shores of US territory are part of this program. We can draw on NATO air and ground units for special purposes. The more sinister part of this, however, is that it allows the president to draw on NATO resources and authorize the use of foreign troops in an actual combat role on US soil.
Under the War Powers Act of 1947, the United States always had the option to allow the placement of foreign troops on US soil - for training purposes and logistical support. However, they had to be contained in a certain area and they could only have a certain number of armaments and so on.
Now all those previous restrictions have been removed. The president could ask NATO to put a standing force in the United States with upgraded weapons, vehicles and training. They keep using this phrase "urban control" and "domestic control." If there was ever a huge uprising in the United States, you could envision this scenario -- too many people all of a sudden found out the truth and that would cause widespread civil unrest. The only way that widespread civil unrest could occur is if too many of the American people found out the truth - if they put down the flag, took off their blinders and discovered what the truth was. Obviously this would lead to strife, dissension and would soon lead to civil disobedience. And that would eventually lead to some sort of uprising. Now foreign troops could be used to put down or quell any civil unrest in the United States.
The smart people know what's happening. All you have to do is look at where the smart money is going. There is already secret back room talk about the re-imposition of some sort of currency control mechanism in the United States to prevent a mass exodus of dollars out of the country and into offshore accounts. There is even some talk at the Treasury of potentially limiting sales of gold to US citizens, or perhaps some sort of re-imposition of the 1933 Gold Act.
We live in a world that, outside our borders, is falling apart economically. Now that we have Bush in office and Bushonian policies in place, the economic border distinction that existed between the United States and the rest of the world doesn't exist any more. Instead of following a course of fiscal restraint as followed by Bill Clinton, as to engender fiscal surpluses, we are now falling back into Reaganomics, the Bushonian Road of what I call fiscal deficits and deceit. This is taking place at a time when our national debt is already enormous and the rest of the world is falling apart.
If you look at a lot of the Administration's policies, particularly its financial policies to prevent exodus of money, to potentially inhibit people's ability to own gold, it tells you that they know everything is falling apart and that they're going to need these financial controls - when things do fall apart.
If you look at all of the numbers, if Bush stays in office a second term and continues with the same policies (he's a Bush; he can't help himself) even if he were followed by another Bill Clinton, I would say that the die has been cast. It's over for us - the United States would also join the coming worldwide collapse that will probably begin in the second decade.
It's been on the drawing boards for decades for us to become a third world nation. In terms of economics, people are starting to wake up a little bit and understand a little bit more of the truth about the Military-Industrial Complex and the connections between Big Business and Republicans. That's always been known, but now people are starting to understand the detrimental effects that this system of a deeply entrenched right wing cabalist government has had on them. Certainly Enron employees are finding that out.
(What's the difference between a right wing cabalist and a crony capitalist?
A cabalist has to shred more documents.)
What's coming is that there will be a string of collapses of major US companies, either collapses or substantial reorganization. Many other corporations are having accounting problems, where money has been siphoned off to Republican Party interests over the years and where senior party members have been allowed to make illicit profits in stock deals.
(It might be time to short in the coming months. From Al Martin's Short Sellers Corner: Here are some names. Viacom. Disney. Possibly even the venerable General Electric itself.)
There have been quiet but persistent rumors for some time about how General Electric has handled the accounting measures for its financial subsidiaries, GE Commercial Credit, which is about 50% of its business. These accounting irregularities don't exist because someone simply screwed up. They were part of a designed cover-up. These accounting irregularities were a scheme to disguise how much money a corporation was giving to the Republican Party or Republican interests, think tanks or organizations.
Bush hasn't been in office for a year and already the percentage of our GDP devoted to debt service has increased. If Bush gets all of his spending plans through and if he were to serve two terms, by the time he leaves office, the expansion of debt service would rise from the current 20% to about 40% of GDP -- a doubling in ten years. This would move the United States economy dangerously close to that of a third world nation.
Meanwhile the Domestic Urban Control Vehicles (about 2,000 Humvees) spotted at the Redstone Arsenal, stored in warehouses, will be used as soon as Posse Comitatus is overturned and domestic law enforcement is fully militarized. Besides all the regular civilian law enforcement that we have, we will also have a militarized law enforcement wing of 50,000 people. These personnel will be pulled on rotation from the National Guard and the Army Reserves, under the new four-star general and the new fifth command. And that's what these 2,000 vehicles will be used for - Domestic Urban Control.
They're outfitting these vehicles with small 18" satellite dishes to act as mobile units for the urban hover drones (See previous story: Coming Soon Flying Fascism) They will also be used to coordinate flight paths and triangulate "hostile transmissions." (Contraband signals containing the truth?) They'll be right on top of it.
Just as the US gets deeper and deeper into Orwellian Territory, reports are coming in that school boards at high schools have been taking Orwell's books off the shelves calling them "seditious." Right wing school boards have said that George Orwell's book 1984 promotes "distrust in government" and therefore is "seditious."
It makes you wonder -- how long until "The Conspirators" is on the "seditious" list?
And now there's a change in verbiage. The "War on Terrorism" is expanding into Colombia and we will start fighting the FARC (The Colombian Revolutionary Front, an anti-Colombian government guerilla group). Bush says that this will no longer require the spending of "fresh" billions of the American taxpayers' money, but "untold" billions. So we've moved from "fresh" to "untold." And I'm thinking to myself, that's the same thing his father, George Bush I, said in 1985 about outspending the Soviet Union, when they started to really ramp up defense spending. He also went from using the word "fresh" to "untold " billions.
At the same time, around 1987, the Reagan Bush Regime was desperate to maintain the level of defense spending to supposedly defeat the "Evil Empire."
The "Evil Empire" (the Soviet Union and its proxies) would have collapsed in 1987, and Washington knew it. That's why they secretly put the arm on the West German government to lend the Soviet government $100 billion under the table in order to keep the Evil Empire alive, so that Washington could milk it a little bit longer.
This is another $100 billion that American taxpayers are responsible for. Since it was a secret protocol (since made public), the question is -- how many other hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in loans were made under the table through US client states that we the American taxpayers are secretly responsible for?
The moral of the story? Beware when a Bush replaces the word "fresh" with the word "untold." The Bush Administration even hinted that their previous budget forecast would be "substantially altered" by this. They're preparing the American people for years, even decades of multi-hundred billion dollar annual federal budget deficits.
So now the country has moved from the Cold War Scam to the Terrorism War Scam. The American people need to understand how much the Bush Administration has turned this thing into a round robin.
Speaking impeccable English, the FARC colonel responded to what Bush had said by stating that they had never attacked any targets in the United States, or any US Government property in Colombia or anywhere else in South America. But if the United States wants to attack us on our own soil, then we are going to commit a campaign of terrorism against the United States, which we would not otherwise have done.
The Bush Administration's response, even before the guy from FARC had made this statement, was that US intervention will probably prompt FARC to commit terrorism acts on US soil. And that's why we are now going to need, not "fresh," but "untold" spending on defense and homeland security, which will require even more repressive measures domestically, including the control of internal movement and the control of the American citizenry. The Government knew that by raising the ante they would have a pretense for more repressive domestic policies. People need to understand that we are precipitating these actions by attacking groups which have never attacked us and have no intention of attacking us and would have left us alone had we done the same.
Bush has said that we have dumped billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to support a succession of Colombian regimes and FARC refuses to negotiate with Colombia, which is a client state of the United States. But this is so disingenuous, because as the FARC colonel pointed out, of all the peace negotiations FARC and the Colombian regimes have had, it has been the Colombian government that had always broken off negotiations.
The FARC colonel also noted that the US Government is doing this out of frustration, having dumped billions and billions of dollars into a Colombian government, which is perpetually unstable. Why? The Colombian government has absolutely no control over the Colombian military, and the military calls the shots. The United States keeps arming and replenishing the Colombian military. The military then pays lip service to the government and that's it. He also talked about Colombian generals and senators that have offshore accounts stuffed with millions of American taxpayer dollars. When the GAO suggested an audit because of all the problems, the Bush Administration vehemently opposed any outside audits of Colombian aid.
Bush's rhetoric is getting even more frightening. He actually said, "I'm proud to announce the largest increase in defense spending since Ronald Reagan." He actually said, "I'm proud." If we're going to be successful in the war against terrorism, our troops must have the best and the most expensive equipment (that doesn't work) on earth. We're going to cut taxes some more, he said, which will drive us into enormous deficits, but if we simply hold the line on non-military and non-internal security spending, we'll be just fine. And the next generation can pay for it. That's the inference. We will spend as much money as it takes "to defeat terrorism worldwide."
What he should have said is that we'll spend as much of other people's money as necessary. He added that the American people understand that they might have to sacrifice some of their rights in order to defeat terrorism and have a "secure" nation. And as the War on Terrorism expands, the people will find that they have to sacrifice even more of their rights. And people are clapping about it. That's what's frightening. People were actually clapping.
What I found dangerous is the look on Bush's face. I think he actually believes what he's saying, and that's where it gets dangerous. It's not just politics anymore. He's intoxicated with the power. It's gone beyond the long-term Bushonian agendas into a state of intoxication with power. You can seen it in his face, in his eyes, the way he pounds his fists on the table all the time. We'll defeat terrorism no matter how much of other people's money we have to spend and no matter how many rights the American people have to sacrifice.
When a Bush starts to believe what he's saying - watch out.
Dennis Kucinich (D - Ohio) made a speech denouncing the USA Patriot Act, and it has not been reported anywhere on broadcast media. He asked, "Why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice"? Why should we cancel the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, the right of free speech, the Fourth Amendment, and our civil liberties? He also mentioned the fact that "the Inspector General has notified Congress that the Pentagon cannot properly account for $1.2 trillion in transactions."
Since anyone who has criticized the Bush Regime in the past has gotten an "anthrax letter," it appears that Mr. Kucinich might be next on the list. . .
ZDNet News
February 27, 2002, 3:00 PM PT
The nation's cell phone service providers will soon know exactly where every one of their customers is, at all times, and privacy rights groups are asking what they plan to do with the information.
All U.S. carriers are under Federal Communications Commission orders to make it possible for police to locate cell phones calling 911, something police can't do now. Carriers plan to use the same systems to sell services like helping stranded motorists even if they don't know their location, or finding the closest restaurant.
Because people with cell phone generally always carry their phone with them, the FCC regulations give the thriving market for personal information something its never had a chance to get: the exact locations at all times of more than 140 million people.
"There are some things you don't mind other people knowing, but your location isn't one of them," said Gary Laden, a privacy program director for BBBOnline, a Better Business Bureau subsidiary.
Private details that become public knowledge every time people visit Web pages and leave information, every address that the U.S. government sells, or every ATM transaction that dutifully records the time are just some of the ways that technology has been tracking individuals. But knowing someone's location at all times adds a significant new twist to tracking information about people.
(Newsbytes)
January 13, 2002
It really can be a jungle out there, but at least the Western Pacific jungles of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) will soon support digital cellular phone services and wireless packet data.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Interwave Communications, a company with a reputation for bringing cellular services to remote locations, said this week it has been chosen by FSM's national telecommunications company to bring global system for mobile communications (GSM) wireless service to a region often referred to as the Caroline Islands.
The sprinkling of 607 islands between Hawaii and Indonesia makes up a landmass about the size of Washington, D.C. But with a footprint that covers some million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, even linking just the most-populous areas adds a sense of immediacy to the concept of cell-phone roaming.
No where to run to nowhere to hide. I guess this would allow Tom Hanks to phone Wilson whenever he likes.
By Ali Al-Timimi
We have been informed by the Prophet sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam about many events that will occur in the future. What attitude should we take in this regard?
So when Allaah (subhaanahu wa ta`aalaa) tells us that it is the West which will be the power and will be our enemy till the Day of Judgment, do we just say, OK, that's a fact, and let us just sit and wait for the battle to come? These are some ideas which some Muslims have that we should just sit and wait for `Eesaa ibn Maryam to come, we should just wait for the Mahdee to appear and until that time we should just sit and just engage ourselves with a lot of intellectual discussions and so forth. Just s it and wait for these events to occur. This is not the way of the Sunnah, the way of the Sunnah is that we face a qadar with a qadar so therefore when it comes to the issue of the West and so forth - we know that for instance that Constantinople will be taken over by the Christians again because the Prophet (Sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam) said that. Constantinople, when it's going to be conquered before the Day of Judgment, it will be conquered without fighting, but that Muslims will say Allaahu Akbar, and some of its walls will fall, and they'll say laa ilaaha ill Allaah, and some of it walls will fall. This is going to be one of the signs of the Day of Judgment, just by saying these takbeers, the city walls will collapse.
We know therefore that what we call now Istanbul will have to return back to Christians one day. So then do we just say let the things in Turkey go as they are? Let the secularism and let the Western entrenchment in Turkey continue as it is, because th is is a divine decree that Allaah has decreed.
No, we fight that qadar with another qadar, in the sense that we make sure that da`wah is in Turkey is strong for as long as it is, so when the time comes for that to occur, it occurs. The Prophet (Sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam) told us that an Ethiopian with two thin shanks will destroy the Ka`bah, piece by piece. So therefore do we say, "Well, OK, it's going to happen, the Ethiopian s going come and destroy the Ka`bah, so therefore whatever happens in the East Africa, we'll just let it happen?" No. We know this will happen, one day the Ka`bah will be destroyed by an Ethiopian, but we fight that qadar with a qadar by making sure that the da`wah is strong in East Africa and that it remains that no non-Muslim country ever has a rule in East Africa, but that strong Muslim states have that.
The Illuminati and the CFR (Council of Foreign Affairs) By MYRON C. FAGAN
What's the part they really left out of "A Beautiful Mind"? The final twist that he wasn't mad at all? Just a man who could see the New World Order from the New World Chaos? What if Satan is just a man from the future, an immortal man with singular knowledge? Who travelled back in time knowing he could never return? A man who sings the Tears for Fears song and has all the time in the world? A man who looks not different to Ron Silver?
19:00 06 March 02
Some people have a special gift for predicting the twists and turns of chaotic systems like the weather and perhaps even financial markets, according to an Australian psychologist.
Richard Heath, who has now moved to the UK's University of Sunderland tried to identify people who can do this by showing volunteers a list of eight numbers and asking them to predict the next four. The volunteers were told that the numbers were maximum temperatures for the previous eight days. In fact the numbers were computer-generated: some sets were part of a chaotic series while the rest were random.
Random sequences are by their nature unpredictable, whereas chaotic sequences follow specific rules. Despite this, chaotic sequences are very hard to predict in practice because of the "butterfly effect" - even an unmeasurably small change in initial conditions can have a dramatic impact on their future state.
Nonetheless, Heath found that a quarter of the people he tested could predict the temperature for at least the next two days if the sequence was chaotic, rather than random, even though there is no obvious pattern to the figures.
"The $64,000 question is what is going on in their heads," says Heath. He is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is related to specific personality types, or to aspects of intelligence such as mathematical ability.
David Gilden, a psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin, doubts that people can detect the next step in any sequence that lacks a perceptible pattern. "It's a strong claim, to assert that the skill only exists implicitly," he says.
But others are convinced that Heath is onto something. "It's sound. The effect looks real," says artificial intelligence expert Jeff Pressing of the University of Melbourne.
He and others point to a crucial difference between this and previous studies claiming to show that people can identify the patterns in chaotic systems: Heath distinguished between the effects of chaos and other characteristics of the sequences that might help people make correct predictions.
In particular, Heath was able to exclude the possibility that the people making successful predictions were doing so by looking only at the last few numbers. In other words, they were not able to cheat by assuming that "the weather tomorrow is likely to be the same as the weather today".
If the finding does stand up, testing for sensitivity to chaos might help financial institutions identify people who would do well as financial traders. "Some guys can't communicate what they are doing, but they make millions," says Pressing. "They have some sort of intuition. My guess is that they are sensitive to subtle non-linear structures like chaos."
I wonder if they just know when to wear a coat?
Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Snider accused the DRUDGE REPORT on Thursday of "tumbling down" a "moral slope" after it was revealed how filmmakers of the Oscar nominated film A BEAUTIFUL MIND quietly left out all references to John Nash's anti-Semitic views.
MORE
Jew Bashing scenes found in the book "A Beautiful Mind: The Life of the Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash" were completely scrubbed from the film, directed by Ron Howard and staring Russell Crowe -- even though actor Crowe's picture is featured on the paperback of the biography!
Snider, who is Jewish, blasted the DRUDGE REPORT in interviews with journalists gathered in Las Vegas for ShoWest 2002.
"Lines that should be clear to all of us have recklessly been crossed," Snider said, after it was revealed how Nash once wrote in a letter: "The root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned are Jews."
Author Sylvia Nasar's repeated references to Nash's feeling towards Jews were deliberately left off the screen, a move that has troubled some Academy voters.
Now three Academy members have come forward to reveal how they've switched their votes.
Explained one voter from New York: "When the movie was first released, they latched themselves to the book, putting Russell's face on the cover... issuing press releases about the 'life of John Nash'. I have one right here. And now they are distancing themselves from it all, saying it was only loosely based?"
As OSCAR voting comes to a close, Snider and MIND filmmakers are making great attempts to slowdown the growing controversy.
"These are just tabloid headlines," Snider told the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. "If you are a responsible writer, you don't take statements out of context that someone made during a 35-year battle with schizophrenia."
Snider told reporters that DRUDGE is being used by a rival studio to smear the UNIVERSALDREAMWORKS film.
DREAMWORKS heavy Jeffrey Katzenberg told one associate: "This is the lowest smear I've ever seen in this business!"
"When something goes on DRUDGE, it does not get there by accident," echoed SUN-TIMES columnist Roger Ebert on Friday's Howard Stern broadcast.
["No. Most psychotics do hate the Jews," barked Stern.]
Writes Nasar: "Before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, [Nash] explained, he was a left-wing Palestinian Arab refugee, a member of the PLO, and a refugee making a "g indent" in Israel's border, petitioning Arab nations to protect him from 'falling under the power of the Israeli state...
"Later when Nash became paranoid and embraced all sorts of strange delusions, he wrote letters to Newman and others addressed 'Jewboy'. He became obsessed with the state of Israel and talked about 'Krypto-Zionist conspiracies.'"
Also left out of Howard's BEAUTIFUL:
-- How Nash fathered an illegitimate son and refused to support him.
The filmmakers "completely left me out of it. They tried to pretend I don't exist," Nash mistress Elenor Stier explained.
-- Details of Nash's 1954 arrest for 'indecent exposure' and 'making a come-on to another man' in a public bathroom.
'American audiences don't care to see Russell Crowe getting it on with a man! It would just kill us at the boxoffice," a production source said earlier this year.
By Bill Gertz Who may as well be called Ari Fleischer.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
U.S. intelligence agencies have obtained new information indicating Iraq is holding captive a U.S. Navy pilot shot down during the Persian Gulf war, The Washington Times has learned
British intelligence provided the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) with the new information several months ago, and intelligence officials said it could assist in the ongoing investigation into the fate of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher.
Cmdr. Speicher was declared killed in action in 1991 after his F-18 Hornet was shot down over Iraq. But last year he was re-classified as "missing in action" by the Pentagon, based on information from an Iraqi defector.
According to U.S. intelligence officials, the British intelligence information was based on an additional intelligence source — someone who had been in Iraq and said he had learned that an American pilot is being held captive in Baghdad.
The British report stated further that only two Iraqis were permitted to see the captive American pilot: the chief of Iraq's intelligence service, and Uday Hussein, son of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The new intelligence has led some Pentagon officials to believe Iraq is holding Cmdr. Speicher prisoner.
One U.S. official said the new agent offered to identify the exact location in Baghdad where the American is being held and also offered to obtain a photograph of the prisoner.
A defense official said the new information is not related to an earlier report from an Iranian pilot who was repatriated recently to Iran and said that he had seen an American held prisoner in Iraq. "That was checked out, and the intelligence community didn't find anything about it," the defense official said.
President Bush has been briefed on the new intelligence on Cmdr. Speicher and the likelihood of an American POW in Baghdad is being factored into U.S. policy toward future operations against Iraq, the officials said.
DIA spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Jim Brooks said the Speicher case is "an active investigation." The agency "investigates and continues to investigate all reports regarding the Speicher case." He declined to comment further on specific reports on the case.
A White House spokesman could not be reached for comment.
It could not be learned if the Bush administration is taking steps to contact the Iraqi government about Cmdr. Speicher.
However, U.S. intelligence agencies are continuing to gather information on the case, the official said.
The CIA sent a notice to Congress Feb. 4 saying it had obtained new intelligence related to Cmdr. Speicher and is expected to provide more information in a briefing that could come as early as this week, one official said.
A U.S. intelligence report from March 2001 stated: "We assess that Iraq can account for Cmdr. Speicher but that Baghdad is concealing information about his fate."
The report, ordered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated that Cmdr. Speicher "probably survived the loss of his aircraft, and if he survived, he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis."
The report stated that Cmdr. Speicher's aircraft was shot down by an Iraqi jet firing an air-to-air missile, and that the jet crashed in the desert west of Baghdad.
An unclassified summary of the report, "Intelligence Community Assessment of the Lieutenant Commander Speicher Case," was obtained by The Times.
The intelligence community report said that after the Gulf war cease-fire, Cmdr. Speicher was not among the 21 U.S. military personnel released, nor were his remains returned.
The new intelligence information bolsters an earlier report from an Iraqi national. In 1999, an Iraqi defector reported to U.S. intelligence officials that he had taken an injured U.S. pilot to Baghdad six weeks after the Gulf war began. He identified Cmdr. Speicher in a photograph as the pilot.
Based on the defector report and pressure from Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican, the Navy changed Cmdr. Speicher's status from killed in action to missing in action on Jan. 11, 2001.
The intelligence community report stated that during an investigation of the crash site in 1995, Iraqi officials provided investigators with a flight suit that appeared to be the one worn by Cmdr. Speicher. The flight suit had been cut.
The intelligence report concluded that the pilot "probably survived the crash of his F/A-18."
"We assess Lt. Cmdr. Speicher was either captured alive or his remains were recovered and brought to Baghdad," the report said.
Mr. Bush has called Iraq one of three "axis of evil" states, and there have been intelligence reports indicating Iraq may have supported the September 11 attacks.
The government of the Czech Republic monitored a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, regarded by U.S. investigators as a ringleader for the September 11 attacks.
Senior Pentagon policy-makers have said Iraq should be the next target for U.S. anti-terrorism operation.
Cmdr. Speicher was the pilot of a Navy F-18 jet that was shot down by enemy fire on Jan. 17, 1991, the first day of combat operations in the Gulf war.
Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney said during a news conference that same day that the pilot had been killed, and the Navy declared Cmdr. Speicher killed in action five months later.
The intelligence community report said that Iraq's government learned that the pilot was declared dead and as a result felt it probably did not have to account for him at the end of the war.
At first the Pentagon believed Cmdr. Speicher's aircraft was hit by either a ground- or air-fired missile and broke up in flight.
But the aircraft was later found intact and its canopy was found some distance from the crash, a sign the pilot had ejected.
The CIA also was told about the capture of an American pilot in the early 1990s but dismissed the information as coming from an unreliable agent, the officials said. The agency later acknowledged its dismissal was an error, U.S. officials said.
This is an old story. I saw a documentary about it over a year ago. The fact that it surfaces at the same time Cheney's feet land in the Middle East shows the US administration's main concern is hardly the guy's welfare. Especially since he was basically left for dead in the first place.
The decision to dispatch the US special envoy General Anthony Zinni to the Middle East was the price Washington
was forced to pay for the tacit compliance of its Arab allies with an eventual offensive on Iraq, diplomats and analysts said yesterday.
"It'll cost ya."
A postcard showing Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, Canada.
March 7, 2002 11:55pm
SAADET ORUC, Ankara - Turkish Daily News
03/07/2002
The U.S. military deployment in Georgia is tied to the demands of the oil and insurance companies involved in the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, analysts say.
According to experts, the insurance companies were demanding a security guarantee for the pipeline.
Commenting that Georgia was the short-term route for Caspian oil reserves, while Afghanistan was the long-term route for energy reserves, authorities have stated that every step taken in these two states has been linked to oil-politics.
The most important mission of the U.S. military deployment will be the enhancement of the security of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan route, analysts say, while the Armenian route for the pipeline has been completely shelved.
The Armenian diaspora has been pressing for the transportation of Caspian oil through Armenia, an option which has been strongly opposed by Ankara and Baku.
It was demanded that transportation revenues for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline be paid and the insurance companies have also demanded a security guarantee for the pipeline.
British Petroleum (BP) and British insurance companies are involved in the Baku-Ceyhan project and have put pressure on governments to lift barriers to the pipeline.
Turkey has been optimistic about the U.S. military involvement in Georgia.
Financial Times Information Limited - Asia Africa Intelligence Wire
05 March 2002
Hopes for a tabletop fusion device dimmed further Tuesday after scientists reacted to a Monday announcement, but the researcher who led the invention of the laboratory process remains convinced his experiments were viable and can be reproduced.
Rusi Taleyarkhan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory led a team that claimed to create nuclear fusion reactions using bubbles and sound. From the outset, Taleyarkhan cautiously noted that the results needed to be duplicated by other researchers. A paper on the process is set to appear in the March 8 issue of the journal Science.
Prior to the planned public release of the paper, however, another Oak Ridge group provided evidence that the results could not be duplicated.
Taleyarkhan's team had said they detected flashes of light, an isotope called tritium, and high-energy neutrons when they forced bubbles to collapse under the pressure of intense sound waves in a process known as sonoluminescence. The other Oak Ridge group said it detected no high-energy neutrons. Taleyarkhan's team responded Monday, saying the other group had improperly calibrated its detector.
Sat Mar 9, 9:03 AM ET
(By MICHAEL MASSING The New York Times)
Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation.
Such startling propositions the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years have gained wide acceptance among non- Orthodox rabbis. But there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss them with the laity until now.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, has just issued a new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60 years. Called "Etz Hayim" ("Tree of Life" in Hebrew), it offers an interpretation that incorporates the latest findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures. To the editors who worked on the book, it represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document.
"When I grew up in Brooklyn, congregants were not sophisticated about anything," said Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" and a co-editor of the new book. "Today, they are very sophisticated and well read about psychology, literature and history, but they are locked in a childish version of the Bible."
"Etz Hayim," compiled by David Lieber of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, seeks to change that. It offers the standard Hebrew text, a parallel English translation (edited by Chaim Potok, best known as the author of "The Chosen"), a page-by-page exegesis, periodic commentaries on Jewish practice and, at the end, 41 essays by prominent rabbis and scholars on topics ranging from the Torah scroll and dietary laws to ecology and eschatology.
These essays, perused during uninspired sermons or Torah readings at Sabbath services, will no doubt surprise many congregants. For instance, an essay on Ancient Near Eastern Mythology," by Robert Wexler, president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, states that on the basis of modern scholarship, it seems unlikely that the story of Genesis originated in Palestine. More likely, Mr. Wexler says, it arose in Mesopotamia, the influence of which is most apparent in the story of the Flood, which probably grew out of the periodic overflowing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The story of Noah, Mr. Wexler adds, was probably borrowed from the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh.
Equally striking for many readers will be the essay "Biblical Archaeology," by Lee I. Levine, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "There is no reference in Egyptian sources to Israel's sojourn in that country," he writes, "and the evidence that does exist is negligible and indirect." The few indirect pieces of evidence, like the use of Egyptian names, he adds, "are far from adequate to corroborate the historicity of the biblical account."
Similarly ambiguous, Mr. Levine writes, is the evidence of the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the ancient name for the area including Israel. Excavations showing that Jericho was unwalled and uninhabited, he says, "clearly seem to contradict the violent and complete conquest portrayed in the Book of Joshua." What's more, he says, there is an "almost total absence of archaeological evidence" backing up the Bible's grand descriptions of the Jerusalem of David and Solomon.
The notion that the Bible is not literally true "is more or less settled and understood among most Conservative rabbis," observed David Wolpe, a rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a contributor to "Etz Hayim." But some congregants, he said, "may not like the stark airing of it." Last Passover, in a sermon to 2,200 congregants at his synagogue, Rabbi Wolpe frankly said that "virtually every modern archaeologist" agrees "that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way that it happened, if it happened at all." The rabbi offered what he called a "litany of disillusion" about the narrative, including contradictions, improbabilities, chronological lapses and the absence of corroborating evidence. In fact, he said, archaeologists digging in the Sinai have "found no trace of the tribes of Israel not one shard of pottery."
The reaction to the rabbi's talk ranged from admiration at his courage to dismay at his timing to anger at his audacity. Reported in Jewish publications around the world, the sermon brought him a flood of letters accusing him of undermining the most fundamental teachings of Judaism. But he also received many messages of support. "I can't tell you how many rabbis called me, e- mailed me and wrote me, saying, `God bless you for saying what we all believe,' " Rabbi Wolpe said. He attributes the "explosion" set off by his sermon to "the reluctance of rabbis to say what they really believe."
Before the introduction of "Etz Hayim," the Conservative movement relied on the Torah commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth. By 1936, when it was issued, the Hebrew Bible had come under intense scrutiny from scholars like Julius Wellhausen of Germany, who raised many questions about the text's authorship and accuracy. Hertz, working in an era of rampant anti-Semitism and of Christian efforts to demonstrate the inferiority of the "Old" Testament to the "New," dismissed all doubts about the integrity of the text.
Maintaining that no people would have invented for themselves so "disgraceful" a past as that of being slaves in a foreign land, he wrote that "of all Oriental chronicles, it is only the Biblical annals that deserve the name of history."
The Hertz approach had little competition until 1981, when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the official arm of Reform Judaism, published its own Torah commentary. Edited by Rabbi Gunther Plaut, it took note of the growing body of archaeological and textual evidence that called the accuracy of the biblical account into question. The "tales" of Genesis, it flatly stated, were a mix of "myth, legend, distant memory and search for origins, bound together by the strands of a central theological concept." But Exodus, it insisted, belonged in "the realm of history." While there are scholars who consider the Exodus story to be "folk tales," the commentary observed, "this is a minority view."
Twenty years later, the weight of scholarly evidence questioning the Exodus narrative had become so great that the minority view had become the majority one.
Not among Orthodox Jews, however. They continue to regard the Torah as the divine and immutable word of God. Their most widely used Torah commentary, known as the Stone Edition (1993), declares in its introduction "that every letter and word of the Torah was given to Moses by God."
Lawrence Schiffman, a professor at New York University and an Orthodox Jew, said that "Etz Hayim" goes so far in accepting modern scholarship that, without realizing it, it ends up being in "nihilistic opposition" to what Conservative Jews stand for. He noted, however, that most of the questions about the Bible's accuracy had been tucked away discreetly in the back. "The average synagogue-goer is never going to look there," he said.
Even some Conservative rabbis feel uncomfortable with the depth of the doubting. "I think the basic historicity of the text is valid and verifiable," said Susan Grossman, the rabbi of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Md., and a co-editor of "Etz Hayim." As for the mounting archaeological evidence suggesting the contrary, Rabbi Grossman said: "There's no evidence that it didn't happen. Most of the `evidence' is evidence from silence."
"The real issue for me is the eternal truths that are in the text," she added. "How do we apply this hallowed text to the 21st century?" One way, she said, is to make it more relevant to women. Rabbi Grossman is one of many women who worked on "Etz Hayim," in an effort to temper the Bible's heavily patriarchal orientation and make the text more palatable to modern readers. For example, the passage in Genesis that describes how the aged Sarah laughed upon hearing God say that she would bear a son is traditionally interpreted as a laugh of incredulity. In its commentary, however, "Etz Hayim" suggests that her laughter "may not be a response to the far- fetched notion of pregnancy at an advanced age, but the laughter of delight at the prospect of two elderly people resuming marital intimacy."
In a project of such complexity, there were inevitably many points of disagreement. But Rabbi Kushner says the only one that eluded resolution concerned Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence." "We couldn't come to a formulation that we could all be comfortable with," the rabbi said. "Some people felt that homosexuality is wrong. We weren't prepared to embrace that as the Conservative position. But at the same time we couldn't say this is a mentality that has been disproved by contemporary biology, for not everyone was prepared to go along with that." Ultimately, the editors settled on an anodyne compromise, noting that the Torah's prohibitions on homosexual relations "have engendered considerable debate" and that Conservative synagogues should "welcome gay and lesbian congregants in all congregational activities."
Since the fall, when "Etz Hayim" was issued, more than 100,000 copies have been sold. Eventually, it is expected to become the standard Bible in the nation's 760 Conservative synagogues.
Mark S. Smith, a professor of Bible and Near Eastern Studies at New York University, noted that the Hertz commentary had lasted 65 years. "That's incredible," he said. "If `Etz Hayim' isn't around for 50 years or more, I'd be surprised."
Its longevity, however, may depend on the pace of archaeological discovery
A system of betting in which the bettor must pick the first three winners in the correct sequence. Also called triple.
[tri- + (per)fecta.]
trifecta of National Emergency, War and Recession? let your ears decide (Via Fark.com)
If he hits another one do we get the fourfuctus? AKA the horsemen?
(New York Times December 7, 2001)
Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush interrupted his inveighing against evildoers to crack a joke. Mr. Bush had repeatedly promised to run an overall budget surplus at least as large as the Social Security surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he remarked to Mitch Daniels, his budget director. "I hit the trifecta."
Lucky him, indeed. The Enron analogy will soon become a tired cliché, but in this case the parallel is irresistible. Enron management and the administration Enron did so much to put in power applied the same strategy: First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at the top. Then, if things don't work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the price. But Enron executives got caught; Mr. Bush believes that the events of Sept. 11 will let him off the hook.
Earlier this year Mr. Bush used projections of vast budget surpluses to push through a huge, 10-year tax cut. Most of that tax cut went to people with incomes of more than $200,000 per year. Now Mr. Daniels tells us that the budget — not just the budget outside Social Security, but the whole enchilada — will be in deficit through 2004. Since the administration's phony budget math ("fuzzy" just doesn't cut it at this point) gets phonier the further you go into the future, this means that we have effectively returned to a state of permanent deficit.
However, with television busy reporting from the caves of Tora Bora, this revelation — which shows that the tax cut was sold on utterly false premises — wasn't even considered headline news.
Administration officials insist that the economic slowdown and the war on terror, not the tax cut, are responsible for the red ink. But this is flatly untrue: antiterror spending is a minor factor, and the persistence of projected deficits into the indefinite future tells us that it's not caused by the recession either.
Anyway, they're missing the point. Opponents of the administration's plan always warned that it was foolish to lock in a giant tax cut on the basis of hypothetical surplus projections. They urged, to no avail, that we wait to see the actual budget results. Now their warnings have proved prophetic — and ordinary Americans will suffer because they were ignored.
The administration now says that the tax cut was necessary to fight the current recession. But nobody is questioning the $40 billion in rebates actually paid out so far, and few would complain about another round of temporary tax cuts for the year ahead. It's the huge further tax cuts that will take place after 2002 — tax cuts that are now the law of the land — that are the problem. But we're supposed to accept those future cuts as a fait accompli. Hey, Mr. Bush hit the trifecta.
Meanwhile, the return of budget deficits has real, nasty consequences. Prescription drug insurance is, of course, dead. Bolstering Social Security? Don't be silly: payroll tax receipts are being used neither to acquire assets nor to pay down federal debt; instead, they are subsidizing deficits in the rest of the government.
And austerity rules, even in areas you might have thought were of the highest priority. Money to rebuild New York? Sorry, no. The government's own experts say we need $3 billion to guard against bioterrorism? Cut the number in half. Tax cuts are more important.
Meanwhile, state and local governments, savaged both by recession and by new security expenses, are firing teachers and slashing services. How about some revenue-sharing from the feds? Never mind.
Whenever they were asked, voters said that the "compassionate" parts of Mr. Bush's campaign promises — securing Social Security, providing more money for prescription drugs and education — were more important to them than tax cuts. But they were assured that there was enough money for everything. Those assurances were false — but the tax cut is sacrosanct, while the rest is expendable.
Mr. Bush could try to undo some of the damage, by canceling future tax cuts for the top income bracket. Instead, he wants to accelerate those cuts. That's the moral equivalent of the big bonuses Enron gave to executives just days before it went bankrupt.
Horse racing is a zero-sum game; so, it seems, is budget politics. Mr. Bush hit the trifecta; the great majority of Americans lost, big time.
Mon Feb 11, 6:06 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) on Monday distanced himself from remarks attributed to him by columnist Cal Thomas, who quoted Ashcroft as saying that "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him."
Justice Department (news - web sites) spokeswoman Susan Dryden said Ashcroft made "references to extremist suicide terrorists who have hijacked the religion" in the Nov. 9 interview. Reports that Ashcroft applies the same belief more broadly to all of Islam "do not accurately reflect the attorney general's view," she said.
Ashcroft was traveling Monday and couldn't be reached for comment.
In a radio commentary called "Men of Faith in Washington, D.C.," Thomas said Ashcroft defined Christianity as "a faith in which God sends his son to die for you."
Thomas told The New York Daily News, which first reported the controversy, that he stood by his account. "I wrote it down accurately and repeated it to make sure I had it right," Thomas told the newspaper. "I've got my integrity and a four-decade career as a journalist, and people can decide for themselves."
The Justice Department noted that Ashcroft met Oct. 16 with Arab and Muslim leaders to reassure them that it was U.S. policy to "enforce laws that would guarantee that Americans, regardless of their national origin, are to be respected and their rights are to be safeguarded."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group, urged Ashcroft on Monday to clarify the remarks, which the group called "offensive" and "unbecoming of a law enforcement official who is currently initiating and administering policies that have a disproportionate impact on Muslims."
Nihad Awad, the group's executive director, said President Bush (news - web sites) and others should distance themselves from the remarks attributed to Ashcroft.
Another group, the Arab American Institute, wrote to Bush to call the remarks "a horrible distortion of Islam" that "send the wrong signal to Americans and do a grave disservice to your administration's efforts to unite all Americans in the war against terror."
3-8-2
TOKYO (UPI) - A new report from Japan Thursday reveals a vast amount of water -- up to five times or more than in the oceans -- may hide in the molten layers of rock near the Earth's core.
While this deep water would be locked away in crystal lattices instead of pooling in giant underground seas, as in Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth," this incredible reservoir may still help shake the foundations we stand on, making rock melt much easier and flow significantly quicker.
"The presence of water in a crystal structure could reduce the strength of a mineral," explained lead researcher Motohiko Murakami and his colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in the journal Science. The rock around the core could therefore be "considerably softened."
These findings may also explain how iridescent crystals made their way into unusual diamonds ejected from volcanoes in Brazil.
"They're sort of a peacock color in the diamonds -- quite pretty, actually," said diamond geologist Mark Hutchison at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Geologists believe when Earth originally formed from dust, it should have contained 100 times more water than now found in the oceans. While a great deal of that may have boiled away into space early on, scientists also suspect some of it may still lie hidden deep in Earth's interior.
Earth is split up into three distinct layers -- the thin, fractured outer crust some 20 miles deep, the inner metal core roughly 4,300 miles wide and the hot rock of the mantle in-between, about 1,800 miles thick.
For years, scientists have known water gets sucked from the oceans down the cracks in the crust into the upper, shallow layers of the mantle, where it lowers melting points and helps liquefy rock, aiding in the birth of volcanic eruptions.
"Water is certainly being taken down -- the question is once you get deeper in the mantle, is the water forced upwards or does it get accommodated in the minerals of the lower mantle?" Hutchison said. "And the answer here is that it can."
The investigators synthesized materials normally found only in the high temperatures and high pressures near the Earth's core, such as silicate crystals called perovskites and a black cubic mineral known as magnesiowustite. Surprisingly, they could absorb up to two-thousandths their weight in water -- an amount counting for five times the world's oceans.
There may be even twice that amount of water or more, if evidence from iridescent perovskite crystals in Brazilian diamonds Hutchison found is right. The team in Japan discovered aluminum helped perovskite absorb more water. Hutchison believes his diamonds are from the lower mantle, and the gems indicate aluminum levels are higher near the center of the Earth than the Japanese researchers estimated.
Hutchison commented that while all these results say water can be down there, "they don't answer the question if water is actually down there. But now that we have an idea of what the maximum amounts may be, then we can go back and tackle the question using mathematical modeling."
He explained that water at that depth could make the flow of rock -- which affects global activity -- significantly more rapid.
rides high
(Reuters) - LONDON (Reuters) - Australia's
pocket-size pop princess Kylie Minogue is riding high -- the 33-year-old star has now conquered the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and been garlanded with pop awards after her remarkable renaissance in the charts.
Kylie -the new Britney? Who'd have thunk it. Finally a nice 'mature' woman for the dads to lust after without feeling like dirty old men already.
Military: Administration, in a secret report, calls for a strategy against at least seven nations: China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria.
Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable (LATIMES)
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has directed the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations, according to a classified Pentagon report obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. It says the weapons could be used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or "in the event of surprising military developments."
A copy of the report was obtained by defense analyst and Times contributor William Arkin. His column on the contents appears in Sunday's editions.
Officials have long acknowledged that they had detailed nuclear plans for an attack on Russia. However, this "Nuclear Posture Review" apparently marks the first time that an official list of potential target countries has come to light, analysts said. Some predicted the disclosure would set off strong reactions from governments of the target countries.
"This is dynamite," said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "I can imagine what these countries are going to be saying at the U.N." Arms control advocates said the report's directives on development of smaller nuclear weapons could signal that the Bush administration is more willing to overlook a long-standing taboo against the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort. They warned that such moves could dangerously destabilize the world by encouraging other countries to believe that they, too, should develop weapons.
"They're trying desperately to find new uses for nuclear weapons, when their uses should be limited to deterrence," said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World. "This is very, very dangerous talk . . . Dr. Strangelove is clearly still alive in the Pentagon."
But some conservative analysts insisted that the Pentagon must prepare for all possible contingencies, especially now, when dozens of countries, and some terrorist groups, are engaged in secret weapon development programs.
They argued that smaller weapons have an important deterrent role because many aggressors might not believe that the U.S. forces would use multi-kiloton weapons that would wreak devastation on surrounding territory and friendly populations.
"We need to have a credible deterrence against regimes involved in international terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction," said Jack Spencer, a defense analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. He said the contents of the report did not surprise him and represent "the right way to develop a nuclear posture for a post-Cold War world."
A spokesman for the Pentagon, Richard McGraw, declined to comment because the document is classified.
Congress requested the reassessment of the U.S. nuclear posture in September 2000. The last such review was conducted in 1994 by the Clinton administration. The new report, signed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, is now being used by the U.S. Strategic Command to prepare a nuclear war plan.
Bush administration officials have publicly provided only sketchy details of the nuclear review. They have publicly emphasized the parts of the policy suggesting that the administration wants to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.
Since the Clinton administration's review is also classified, no specific contrast can be drawn. However, analysts portrayed this report as representing a break with earlier policy.
U.S. policymakers have generally indicated that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states unless they were allied with nuclear powers. They have left some ambiguity about whether the United States would use nuclear weapons in retaliation after strikes with chemical or nuclear weapons.
The report says the Pentagon should be prepared to use nuclear weapons in an Arab-Israeli conflict, in a war between China and Taiwan, or in an attack from North Korea on the south. They might also become necessary in an attack by Iraq on Israel or another neighbor, it said.
The report says Russia is no longer officially an "enemy." Yet it acknowledges that the huge Russian arsenal, which includes about 6,000 deployed warheads and perhaps 10,000 smaller "theater" nuclear weapons, remains of concern.
Pentagon officials have said publicly that they were studying the need to develop theater nuclear weapons, designed for use against specific targets on a battlefield, but had not committed themselves to that course.
Officials have often spoken of the advantages of using nuclear weapons to destroy the deep tunnel and cave complexes that many regimes have been building, especially since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Nuclear weapons give off powerful shock waves that can crush structures deep in the Earth, they point out.
Officials argue that large nuclear arms have so many destructive side effects, from blast to heat and radiation, that they become "self-deterring." They contend the Pentagon needs "full spectrum deterrence"--that is, a full range of weapons that potential enemies believe might be used against them.
The Pentagon was actively involved in planning for use of tactical nuclear weapons as recently as the 1970s. But it has moved away from them in the last two decades.
Analysts said the report's reference to "surprising military developments" referred to the Pentagon's fears that a rogue regime or terrorist group might suddenly unleash a wholly unknown weapon that was difficult to counter with the conventional U.S. arsenal.
The administration has proposed cutting the offensive nuclear arsenal by about two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200 missiles, within 10 years. Officials have also said they want to use precision guided conventional munitions in some missions that might have previously been accomplished with nuclear arms.
But critics said the report contradicts suggestions the Bush administration wants to cut the nuclear role.
"This clearly makes nuclear weapons a tool for fighting a war, rather than deterring them," said Cirincione.
Thu, Feb. 28, 2002
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/2768289.htm
Pizza delivery may have been ambush
SUSPECT LATER FOUND DEAD
By Sean Webby and Lisa Krieger
Mercury News
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, police said.
Guyang ``Matthew'' Huang called his wife in Foster City with the
news: I just killed my ex-boss. Now I'm going to kill myself.
Within an hour, a jogger found Huang's body off a path near the San
Mateo Bridge. A cell phone was in Huang's pocket and a .380-caliber
handgun lay near his hand.
Investigators on Thursday were just beginning to put together the
details of the deadly nexus between the two immigrant scientists.
``It looked like an ambush,'' said Mountain View Police spokesman Jim
Bennett. ``He may have used the pizza to lure her out.''
A former colleague of both Holzmayer and Huang thinks he knows the
motive: Holzmayer fired Huang from his job at PPD Discovery, a
biotech company in Menlo Park, according to Dr. Igor B. Roninson.
``She told me she got orders from senior management to fire him,''
said Roninson, a genomic scientist with the University of Illinois-
Chicago and a consultant for PPD. ``She had to fulfill those orders,
but was very upset. She had no choice, no options.
``But this is a year later!''
A company spokeswoman said Huang left PPD in June, but she wouldn't
confirm that he was fired. Neither Huang nor Holzmayer were still
with the company. Holzmayer had quit in December to start her own
biotech venture.
Both Holzmayer, 46, and Huang, 38, were highly regarded in genetics.
She 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. He was a brilliant scholar -- scoring 11th out of 230,000
students on his college entrance exams in China -- and an activist
who fought for reform in his homeland once he came to the United
States to study in 1986.
Outside of the company's Menlo Park office on Thursday, puffy-eyed
employees gathered in small groups but shook their heads when
approached by a reporter.
On Wednesday, just past 8:30 p.m., the Domino's deliveryman had
pulled up to Holzmayer's home on Windmill Park Lane. Holzmayer and
her teenage son were inside when the doorbell rang. She told the
deliveryman that she hadn't ordered a pizza, according to Mountain
View police.
Huang appeared from behind the deliveryman. He shot Holzmayer several
times at close range in the chest and head, police said. As Holzmayer
fell in her doorway, Huang ran to a Ford Explorer and drove away.
Police said the deliveryman witnessed the shooting but was not
involved. A Domino's spokeswoman said the driver wasn't hurt, but
would be offered counseling and time off.
Just a few doors away, the Brogan family heard the shots, then the
tires screeching, and saw the deliveryman running in a panic. After
calling 911, Evan Brogan went with his mother, Micheline, a nurse, to
their neighbors' home. Holzmayer was lying in her doorway with no
pulse.
``We were just trying to help. But she was gone,'' Evan said.
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, police
said. He told her he was near their home by the bay. Then he hung up.
Huang's wife called 911, 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.
Soon afterward, police interviewed Huang's wife, whom they wouldn't
identify. She said she believed that her husband had killed Holzmayer
and told them where they both had worked.
People who answered the door Thursday at Huang's apartment declined
any comment.
Holzmayer and her family came to the United States in 1989, according
to Roninson, a classmate of hers at Moscow State University in
Russia.
She was an intellectual, he said, torn between becoming a classical
pianist or a scientist. She chose genomics over her beloved Chopin,
focusing on helping create new drugs that interfere with replication
of the virus that causes AIDS.
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, N.C. It was at PPD Discovery that Holzmayer met Huang,
who began working as the firm's director of molecular biology and
bioinformatics in early 2000.
Roninson said Huang ``gave a perfectly normal, charismatic
impression.''
Holzmayer told Roninson two weeks ago that she had just received
funding for her new start-up venture to use modern methodologies to
develop new drugs.
``She said she had never felt so happy in her life.''
It seems that a woman with whom Fund had an affair twenty years ago named Melinda Pillsbury Foster sent her daughter, Morgan, to look up Fund when she came to town. One thing led to another and the results appear to have been a live-in relationship and an abortion. This is strange enough for a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who, although very much a
gentleman in person, penned some of the most vicious and irresponsible material about Clinton and the Democrats outside
the columns of this magazine. (Fund is also a ghostwriter for Rush Limbaugh and, irony of ironies, is widely believed to be
the source of Matt Drudge's libelous claim that Sidney Blumenthal is a wife-beater.)
Anyway, things did not exactly work out. Mother and daughter decided to take their revenge by uploading onto the web a
taped telephone call in which John attempts to reconcile his support for Morgan's abortion with his "family values" politics.
They then informed the media that John and Morgan had decided to wed after all. This turned out to be false, but the next
thing you know, Fund is gone from the Journal's editorial page, arrested in Manhattan for battery of Melinda and under a restraining order. (Join me for a moment in imagining what the Wall Street Journal/Washington Times/New York Post/Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/American Spectator scandal machine would do with this crazy story if it were about, say, Frank Rich.)
(This is a comedy bit)
I have a question:
Hypothetically...
If your name was Christine and you worked at CNSNews.com, (Christian News Service) and you
once worked for Rep. Mark Sanford and also for Steve Forbes's presidential campaign, and you held
a bachelor's degree in history from George Mason University and is currently working towards
a juris masters degree at GMU's law school
- would it be a good idea or a bad idea to send John Fund nude pictures of yourself?
ha ha
Make me stop!!!
AND...
How bad would it be if those pictures fell into the hands of a fella who...
Oh, ...I dunno, ...
let's say a fella had a comedy treehouse website
and was begging, just BEGGING for someone to sue him.
How bad would that be, ...do you think?
Would that be a little bit embarrassing for Christine?
Of course, I'm not saying these pictures exist,
and I'm not saying I'm looking at them right now.
ha ha
I'm just asking how bad that would be for Christine at CNS...
I wonder - would Mr.Bozelle be upset?
Or does he have copies, too?
Of course, if Christine had never sent John Fund any nude pictures of herself,
it would be impossible for these pictures to exist, right?
Then this would just be a comedy bit for the reader's entertainment, right?
The "magic number" of people needed to create a viable population for multi-generational space travel has been calculated by researchers. It is about the size of a small village - 160. But with some social engineering it might even be possible to halve this to 80.
Anthropologist John Moore from University of Florida tackled the problem as part of a combined effort with space scientists to determine how in future humans might successfully undertake century-long journeys out into space.
In the past, attention has been focused on cryogenics, sperm banks and military-style modes of operation, says Moore, but "the 'right stuff' for a journey into space is the family - a million-year-old institution designed to assist reproduction."
Moore has previously studied small migrating populations of early humans and has developed simulation software - called Ethnopop - for analysing the viability of small groups.
Marriage partners
For a space trip of 200 years, perhaps eight to 10 generations, his calculations suggest a minimum number of 160 people are needed to maintain a stable population.
This would produce around 10 potential marriage partners per person, he says, and if this seems a small number, "think about how many people you dated before you got married".
Room would be at a premium on any spacecraft and reducing the number of people initially required might be desirable. Moore suggests two strategies. The first is to begin with young childless couples, echoing the practice of Polynesian seafaring colonists.
The second is to ask the space crew to postpone reproduction to later in woman's fertile period, perhaps age 35 to 40, creating longer time gaps between the generations. This measure results in a stable population of just 80 but the consequences of the increased medical risks of late childbirth have not yet been considered.
A potential concern is that small populations can suffer a damaging reduction in genetic diversity due to inbreeding, says Dennis O'Rourke from the University of Utah. He considered the same 10-generation, 200-year journey as Moore and looked at both genetic drift and inbreeding.
"The decrease in genetic variation is actually quite small and less than found in some successful small populations on Earth," he says. "It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period."
Gene screening
O'Rourke believes that a more serious concern would be the presence of potentially damaging genotypes in the initial space pioneers. Genetic screening might well be needed, he says: "Any harmful recessive characteristics might lead to increased healthcare loads which would deplete scarce resources."
A final concern raised at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Boston was the possibility of infighting. Small communities isolated for long periods at research stations in Antarctic and even families travelling on long car journeys, provide examples of how small conflicts can quickly escalate.
But Moore points out: "Some small island communities on Earth have lived in peace and harmony for thousands of years because they have developed ways of solving conflicts. These are not taken to Antarctica."
The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may completely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the entire ocean's fishery.
"We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. Putting new ocean-wide management plans into place is the only way to reverse the trend, Watson and his colleagues say.
Concentrations of biomass of "table" fish in 1950 (left) and 1999
North Atlantic catches have fallen by half since 1950, despite a tripling of the effort put into catching them. The total number of fish in the ocean has fallen even further, they say, with just one sixth as many high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna as there were in 1900. Fish prices have risen six fold in real terms in 50 years.
The shortage of table fish has forced a switch to other species. "The jellyfish sandwich is not a metaphor - jellyfish is being exported from the US," says Daniel Pauly, also at the University of British Columbia. "In the Gulf of Maine people were catching cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber. By earlier standards, these things are repulsive," he says.
Off limits
The only hope for the fishery is to drastically limit fishing, for instance by declaring large portions of the ocean off-limits and at the same time reducing the number of fishing ships. Piecemeal efforts to protect certain fisheries have only caused the fishing fleet to overfish somewhere else, such as west Africa.
"It's like shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic," says Andrew Rosenberg, at the University of New Hampshire. He says the number of boats must be reduced: "Less is actually more with fisheries. If you fish less you get more fish."
Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing, Watson says, with subsidies totalling about $2.5 billion a year in the North Atlantic.
However, Rosenberg was sceptical that any international fishing agreements currently on the table will turn the tide in a short enough timescale. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the OECD have initiatives but these are voluntary, he says. A UN-backed monitoring and enforcement plan of action is being discussed but could take 10 years to come into force.
Pauly says only a public reaction like that against whaling in the 1970s would be enough to bring about sufficient change in the way the fish stocks are managed.
March 6, 2002 Posted: 2:10 PM EST (1910 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The man who was the source of intelligence that terrorists might be plotting to use a stolen Russian nuclear weapon against New York City is "a fabricator" with "delusions of grandeur," U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The existence of an intelligence report on the source's allegations was first reported in Time magazine.
"The only scandal here is that the Defense Intelligence Agency ever used this guy as a source of anything," said one official.
The officials said the man has declined to allow them to make public his name, but they said he is a U.S. citizen who claimed he overheard the alleged plot being discussed in a Las Vegas casino three weeks after the attacks of September 11.
Even the first report concerning the man's assertions noted that he was considered "not credible" officials said.
A U.S. official expressed regret that the report warning of the possible attack was "leaked without context causing unnecessary concern to Americans, especially New Yorkers."
Images show September 11 Pentagon crash
March 7, 2002 Posted: 8:54 PM EST (0154 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Department of Defense on Thursday released a series of photos taken by a security camera that show the fireball from a hijacked airliner crashing into the Pentagon on September 11.
Oops! I guess I spoke too soon about them not releasing the footage. Either that or Rumsflied surfed across the blog?
Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing." >>
By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 6, 2002;
Discoveries made at the University of Dundee are helping in the development of drugs that fool your body into thinking that you are actively exercising even when you are not.
The drugs may help in the fight against the current increase in the incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
Professor Grahame Hardie, Professor of Cellular Signalling in the School of Life Sciences, discovered a system called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK)in the 1980s.
AMPK is switched on by exercise, and triggers the "burning off" of carbohydrate and fats by muscle, preventing them from being stored in fat tissue.
Professor Hardie said: "We discovered that the AMPK system is activated in cells when they run short of energy, and it triggers the uptake and metabolism of glucose and fats. Clearly the best policy is to eat sensibly and exercise regularly, which will greatly reduce your chances of becoming overweight and developing Type 2 diabetes.
"However, when regular exercise is not possible, such as in older people where other health problems may prevent it, drugs that activate AMPK are an alternative. They may help to combat the effects of a sedentary lifestyle".
The US Gov really is taking the piss.
As everyone knows, on 11 September, less than an hour after the attack on the World Trade Centre, an airplane collided with the Pentagon. The Associated Press first reported that a booby-trapped truck had caused the explosion. The Pentagon quickly denied this. The official US government version of events still holds. Here's a little game for you: Take a look at these photographs and try to find evidence to corroborate the official version. It's up to you to Hunt the Boeing!
One wonders if they'll ever release the Gas Station surveillance tape that caught the crash on camera. They never released the above-ground subway station one from the Queens crash either.
WASHINGTON - The investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center has been hampered by the destruction of steel wreckage that could hold vital clues about why the twin towers fell, a fire expert is telling a congressional panel.
Glenn Corbett, a fire science professor at John Jay College, was critical of New York City's decision to melt down and recycle tons of charred and twisted steel from the trade center.
The House Science Committee, led by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., called a hearing Wednesday to determine what might be learned from the deadly collapse of the trade towers after they were struck by a pair of hijacked jetliners Sept. 11.
In testimony prepared for the hearing, engineering and government experts called for a re-evaluation and possible strengthening of building codes to prevent such catastrophic collapses. Similar changes have been adopted in the wake of the Northridge earthquake in California and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Additionally, fire ratings for building materials date from the 1920s and do not take into account new kinds of fuel and accelerants. Those ratings new need study, witnesses said.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology Building and Fire Research Laboratory says the collapse raises questions about current codes governing concrete design and structural integrity and is redirecting federal dollars to augment research in those areas.
Boehlert said more research dollars will be needed to fully investigate and analyze needed improvements.
Experts also planned to complain about the delay in obtaining blueprints, design drawings and maintenance records from the building owners and insurers worried about liability. Such resistance has slowed the investigation, they said.
The investigation into the trade center collapse is being conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers. A FEMA assessment team is expected to release a report of its findings in April.
The team has been examining frame-by-frame footage of the 110-story collapse. Such details could allow them to determine whether the core columns fell first, dragging each floor with them as they fell. Another theory suggests that the exterior columns pulled inward, giving in to floor joists weakened by raging fires.
Some victims' relatives have called for a broader federal probe of the collapse that would investigate factors in addition to structural failures, such as evacuation procedures. And even some engineering experts have raised questions over whether the lightweight steel trusses that supported individual floors and possible fireproofing flaws may have made the twin towers vulnerable to collapse.
Published: Mar 5, 2002
WASHINGTON (AP) - Authorities have arrested and deported dozens of young Israelis since early last year who represented themselves as art students in efforts to gain access to sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, U.S. officials said.
A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration - which first characterized the activities as suspicious - said the youths' actions "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity."
Immigration officials deported them for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed.
The arrests, made in an unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and "attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings."
The Israelis were arrested and deported on charges of working in the United States without authorization or overstaying visits on tourist visas, said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington. He described dozens of arrests since early 2001 but gave no exact figures.
The DEA report said a majority of the students questioned by U.S. investigators acknowledged having served in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordnance units in the Israeli military. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Yaffa Ben-Ari said it was "nonsense" that the students were spying on the United States.
Another Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Irit Stopper, confirmed that a few Israelis posing as art students were expelled from the United States for working without permits. However they were not accused of espionage, she said. She did not say how many Israelis were expelled and did not give any additional details.
The DEA report was first obtained by a French Web site that specializes in intelligence news, Intelligenceonline.com, and confirmed Tuesday as authentic by DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite in Washington. The Web site said 120 Israelis had been arrested.
"That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background," the report said.
An FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted there were no espionage charges filed against any of the individuals and that they had been deported. Asked whether any spying activity occurred, the official repeated that no charges had been filed.
A Justice Department official, also asking not to be publicly identified, said investigators have been aware of some "alleged linkage" between the students and alleged espionage activities in the United States since early 2001, and said authorities have made arrests in Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and in south Florida. INS spokesman Rodney Germain in Miami said five or six people were arrested in that area at least six months ago on immigration counts.
Although security experts at the DEA first characterized the youths' behavior as suspicious, and INS authorities later arrested them, the FBI typically investigates espionage cases in the United States.
The DEA report said that among U.S. sites apparently targeted was Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, home to the military's AWACS surveillance planes and the place where many of the nation's B-1 bombers are repaired. Investigators also said that one female art student went to the home of a worker for the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver to sell paintings and returned later to photograph the house, according to the report.
No one within the Justice Department has expressed concerns about the Israeli students possibly committing espionage, Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra said. The deputy U.S. attorney general, Larry Thompson, declined to discuss the arrests when asked about them during a news conference Tuesday.
The U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, a federal agency, circulated a public warning in March 2001 urging employees to report contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students.
"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."
Cooperation with Israel, a longtime key ally, is increasingly important in the U.S. war on terrorism.
3-6-2
PARIS (Reuters) - The French daily Le Monde reported on Tuesday that the United States had broken up a huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities.
The newspaper cited a secret U.S. government report outlining spying activities by Israelis that it said contained "elements (that) support the theory that Israel did not give the U.S. all the information it had about the planning for the September 11 attacks."
In Washington, however, U.S. law enforcement officials discounted the report, with one calling the assertion of a spy ring "a bogus story."
Le Monde said the secret study said the Israelis posed as graphic arts students and tried to enter buildings belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. agencies.
Intelligence Online, a Paris-based newsletter that reported on the study Monday, said some 120 Israeli spies had been arrested or expelled and inquiries were continuing.
Asked by Reuters Monday about the Intelligence Online report, an FBI spokesman flatly called it a "bogus story." The spokesman said: "There wasn't a spy ring."
In Washington on Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden said of the Le Monde report, "At this time, we have no information to support this."
U.S. officials said some Israeli students had been sent out of the country for immigration violations, not for spying.
In Israel on Monday, a spokesman said the prime minister had no comment on the matter.
Le Monde reported Intelligence Online's findings and added elements it said its reporters had uncovered.
"A vast Israeli espionage network operating on American territory has been broken up," it wrote.
The French newspaper described it as the biggest Israeli spy case in the United States to be made public since 1986, a reference to the life sentence given Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who passed U.S. military secrets to Israel.
The Pollard affair strained relations between the United States and Israel, two traditionally close allies.
Guillaume Dasquie, editor of Intelligence Online, told Reuters Monday the report did not specify exactly what information the alleged agents were seeking.
"The report shows the clandestine network was engaged in several intelligence operations. It was a long-term project," he said.
Le Monde said it published excerpts from the introduction of the June 2001 report, including a comment that the women in the spy ring were "usually very attractive."
AL QAEDA LINK?
Le Monde said more than one third of the suspected Israeli spies had lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 Arabs involved in the Sept. 11 airplane attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon also lived.
At least five of the spies resided in Hollywood, Florida, where alleged hijacker Mohammad Atta and four accomplices in the attacks also lived, the paper said.
The United States holds Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network responsible for the September attacks.
Two Israelis lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Delray Beach, where hijackers in the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania resided temporarily, the report added.
"This concordance could be the source of the American view that one of the missions of the Israeli 'students' could have been to track al Qaeda terrorists on (U.S) territory without informing federal authorities," Le Monde said.
The newspaper said it had seen a copy of the secret report, and that it had learned that six suspected spies had used portable telephones bought by a former Israeli vice consul in the United States.
Both Le Monde and Intelligence Online said the DEA had confirmed the existence of the report drawn up for the Justice Department by the drug agency together with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI and the U.S. Air Force. A spokesman for the U.S. anti-drug agency was not immediately available for comment.
Intelligence Online said the suspects, all between 22 and 30, had recently completed their Israeli military service and one was related to a two-star Israeli general. It named several of the Israelis it said had been arrested.
The inquiry began in February 2001 and is still continuing, it quoted the report as saying.
Sparked by heightened security concerns since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Defense Department has begun laying the groundwork to ban non-U.S. citizens from a wide range of computer projects.
The planned policy--slated for adoption within 90 days--extends restrictions on foreign nationals handling secret information to "sensitive but unclassified positions," which include the swelling numbers of contract workers who process paychecks, write software, track supplies and maintain e-mail systems.
The move comes amid a growing awareness of the vulnerability of government computer systems in an era when software espionage and malicious hacking have become commonplace.
3-4-2
VANCOUVER, Canada - As continuing chemtrail activity culminated in massive aerial spraying over Vancouver Island and Washington state yesterday- and broadening plumes once again fanned out to haze clear blue skies - Air Traffic Controllers at major airports across the United States expressed concern over the emissions constantly showing up on their radar screens.
'Chemtrails' is the term widely used to describe the brilliant white trails laid down by U.S. Air Force tanker planes photo-identified over North America and a dozen other allied nations in a process the U.S. Air Force calls 'aerial obscuration'.
First confirmed by Airport Authority Terry Stewart at the Victoria International Airport on Dec. 8, 2000 as a 'joint Canada-U.S. military operation' and stridently denied by senior officers at Canadian Forces Base (where Stewart later told the Vancouver Courier he had received his information) - these multi-plane missions were verified in March, 2001 by the Air Traffic Control (ATC) manager for the northeastern seaboard of the United States.
In three taped interviews with this reporter and veteran radio journalist S.T. Brendt, our 'Deep Sky' source said that he had been ordered to divert incoming commercial flights away from USAF tankers spraying s substance that showed up on ATC radars as a 'haze'.
These radar returns are the signature of the fine aluminum particles found in laboratory tests of chemtrail-contaminated rain taken in Espanola, Ontario in the summer of 1999. The lab analysis found reflective quartz particles in the chemtrail fallout - and levels of aluminum FIVE TIMES higher than Ontario's maximum permissible health safety standards.
After NDP Defense critic Gordon Earle presented a petition signed by 550 Espanola residents to Parliament in November, 1999 demanding an end to aerial spraying by commercial or military aircraft, foreign or domestic, which appeared to be making many people sick, DND eventually replied, "It's not us."
The aluminum found in chemtrails over Ontario matches the 10 micron aluminum oxide called for in a 1994 patent issued to Hughes Aircraft Company. 'Welsbach Seeding for Reduction of Global Warming' refers to spreading highly reflective materials in the atmosphere to reflect enough incoming sunlight (1 to 2%) to slow rapidly-accelerating global warming.
Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, called for this billion dollar a year 'sky shield' program after computer simulations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showed it would prevent warming over 85% of the planet's surface despite a predicted doubling of heat-trapping C02 in the atmosphere over the next 40 years.
But Ken Caldeira - the climate expert who ran the computer model - has warned that the stratospheric spraying of sunlight-reflecting chemicals could 'destroy the ozone layer' and pose human health risks.
CONTROLLERS CONCERNED ACROSS U.S.
Starting last December, on heavy 'spray days' Deep Sky began calling companion controllers across the country. Were they seeing the same thing on their scopes? What were they being told?
In a fourth interview with reporter S.T. Brendt last week, Deep Sky stated that Air Traffic Controllers at Chicago's O'Hare airport, all three major airports in New York, Los Angeles LAX, San Francisco, Atlanta, Cleveland, San Diego, Washington DC's Dulles and Jacksonville, Florida were being ordered to route airliners beneath formations of Air Force tanker planes spraying something that regularly clouds their screens.
Several smaller but busy airports at Westchester County in New York state and Manchester in New Hampshire were also contacted by this an increasingly concerned Deep Sky - and confirmed similar experiences.
Every controller, without exception, is being told to divert traffic due to military exercises , and to bring in traffic lower because of experiments that may degrade their radars. The controllers at Cleveland's airport were surprised by the extent of obscuration on their radars.
CHEMTRAILS SCIENTIST BREAKS SILENCE
Ohio is the home of Wright-Patterson - the air force base working with electromagnetic and weather modification technology. A scientist working at Wright-Pat recently told reporter Bob Fitrakis that two different projects are being conducted. One involves cloud creation experiments to lessen the effect of global warming. Other chemtrails are connected with the military's extremely high-power Radio Frequency beam weapon in Alaska called HAARP.
The scientist claims that the two most common substances being sprayed into chemtrails are aluminum oxide and barium stearate. When you see planes flying back and forth marking parallel lines, X-patterns and grids in a clear sky, that's aluminum oxide, according to the scientist. The goal is to create an artificial sunscreen to reflect solar radiation back into space to alleviate global warming. In some cases, barium may be sprayed in a similar manner for the purpose of high-tech 3-D radar imaging. (Columbus Alive Dec. 6, 2001)
CONGRESSIONAL BILL CALLS FOR CHEMTRAILS BAN
HR2977 is creating a 'buzz in the Air Traffic Control community. Introduced last October by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, this bill called for the peaceful uses of space, and a ban on 'exotic weapons' . Section 7 of the 'Space Preservation Act of 2001' sought specifically to prohibit 'chemtrails' .
Kucinich recently told the Columbus Alive newspaper (Jan. 24, 2002) that despite official denials, as head of the Armed Services oversight committee he is well acquainted with chemtrail projects. "The truth is there's an entire program in the Department of Defense - 'Vision for 2020' - that's developing these weapons, Kucinich told reporter Bob Fitrakis. The U.S. Space Command's 2020 vision calls for 'dominance of space, land, sea and air'.
Though "section vii" naming chemtrails, HAARP and other planet-threatening weapons has since been removed in a substitute bill - under pressure according to Kucinich - the original bill remains intact and on-file in the congressional record.
CONTRAILS VS CHEMTRAILS
The unusual white plumes reported by Air Canada pilots, police officers and former military personnel over Canada and the U.S. during the past three years are often contrasted by brief, pencil-thin contrails left by commercial jets flying above them.
Contrails form when water vapor clumps around dirt particles acting as nuclei. According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, contrails can only form at temperatures below minus 76 degrees, and humidity levels of 70 percent or more. Even in ideal conditions, contrails rarely last more than 20 minutes.
But atmospheric studies by NASA and NOAA - including TARFOX, ACE-Asia, ACE-I and II, INDOEX and Project SUCCESS - confirm that artificial clouds and contrails can be manufactured under conditions of low humidity by dispensing particles from aircraft. The smaller the size of the nuclei introduced into the atmosphere, the greater the rate of artificial cloud formation.
Controllers across the United States know from their professional training that these chemicals fall to the ground. Without exception they expressed their concern to Deep Sky about possible risks to human health,
"They want to know what the heck is in there," S.T. Brendt reported. "One of them said, 'Aluminum or barium' that's not something you want to be breathing."
Over the last few months, the controller have been told that the troubling aerial operations involve 'climate experiments'. Deep Sky's family continues to experience health problems, including his young son's gushing nose bleeds and episodes of 'Sudden Onset Acute Asthma' in his wife. ___
William Thomas is the author of 'Chemtrails Confirmed' and 'All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion'. His website: www.lifeboatnews.com
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