Epidemic kills scientist who helped discover it

Carlo Urbani, the scientist who discovered the first clue that a dangerous new microbe was beginning to spread around the globe, succumbed yesterday in a Bangkok hospital bed to the frightening disease he alerted the world to.
It was Urbani, an Italian epidemiologist at the World Health Organization's office in Hanoi, who first responded last month when anxious hospital officials phoned to report that a sick U.S. businessman was infecting doctors and nurses with a strange pneumonia. Within days, Urbani himself fell ill.
"Carlo was the one who very quickly saw that this was something very strange. When people became very concerned in the hospital, he was there every day," said Pascale Brudon, the WHO representative in Hanoi. "We are all devastated."
The disease is the first dangerous new infection that spreads directly from one person to another to emerge in decades.
By the time the sick Chinese American businessman, Johnny Cheng, made it to the French Hospital in Hanoi on Feb. 26, he was already deathly ill. It looked like pneumonia, but Cheng's high fever, cough and other symptoms worried doctors. Cheng had just flown in from Hong Kong, where a father and son had recently died from the "bird flu," a deadly bug that experts long feared might spark a pandemic rivaling the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed as many as 50 million people.
Urbani called his regional supervisor in Manila.
"He was reporting a probable case of bird flu," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson, who happened to be where the phone rang on March 5. He was sitting at the desk of a colleague who had been dispatched to Beijing to persuade officials to be less secretive about a mysterious outbreak in Guangdong province in southern China. Since early February, WHO had been hearing reports that hundreds of people were getting sick with what sounded like a strange form of pneumonia. Officials worried that it, too, might be bird flu.
Unbeknownst to health authorities at the time, Cheng, 48, had traveled in Guangdong and is believed to have stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong during the same time as a 64-year-old Chinese professor who had been treating patients in Guangdong. The professor, in Hong Kong for a wedding, had checked into Room 911.

War coverage could alter US media policy


Reporting may influence debate about ownership; More consolidation coming. FCC to decide soon on any rules changes.
News coverage of the war in Iraq, unprecedented in its frequency and immediacy, may influence something long after the war concludes: Who gets to own the media that provide the news?

Bilderberg Group: date and location of this year's conference

Jim Tucker at American Free Press believes he has discovered the venue for this year's Bilderberg Conference to be in Versailles, Paris, France.
The Trianon Palace Hotel - May 15-18 2003. Kenneth Clarke, in a letter to a Scottish Bilderberg researcher, has confirmed the venue.
Also this from a hotel website: Special Conditions From November 24, 2002 to April 30, 2003 the steam room will be closed. From May 15 to May 18, 2003 the hotel will be closed."

Troops who won't fight sent home

A PAIR of British soldiers in the Gulf face up to two years' jail after refusing to fight.
The duo - believed to be a private and an air technician - told officers they would not take part in a war in which innocent civilians were killed.
The two men from 16 Air Assault Brigade - heavily involved in the battles in the south of Iraq - are believed to have been sent back to their barracks in Colchester, Essex.
A third serviceman faces court martial after refusing to travel to the Gulf.
Others are believed to have refused on religious grounds.

US soldiers in Iraq asked to pray for Bush

They may be the ones facing danger on the battlefield, but US soldiers in Iraq are being asked to pray for President George W Bush.
Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called "A Christian's Duty," a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.
"I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God's peace be your guide," says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.

Nearby pulsating star cloud puzzles astronomers

A massive molecular cloud in our galatic neighbourhood is pulsating in a way that is puzzling U.S. astronomers, who said the phenomenon has never seen in molecular clouds before.
Dr Charles Lada of the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Boston and colleagues studied the dark molecular cloud known as Barnard 68 and found the signatures of both in-falling and out-flowing material at different locations across the face of the cloud.
The team described the observations as pulsing, or beating like a heart, every 250,000 years.

USA lied about Iraq's weapons

A US-based Norwegian weapons inspector accuses the USA and Secretary of State Colin Powell with providing the United Nations Security Council with incorrect and misleading information about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), newspaper Dagbladet reports.

Aust Govt defends legal grounds to attack Iraq

Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams says political motives are behind accusations the Government's decision to send troops to war against Iraq is illegal.
Both houses of Federal Parliament are debating the issue.
Mr Williams says the Government's advice that past United Nations resolutions on Iraq allow for military action is sound and independent. He questioned the motives of those who have offered a different opinion.

Indonesia condemns Howard's war decision

The world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, says it is unhappy with Australia's commitment to the looming Iraq war, which it says has no legitimacy.
The Foreign Ministry in Jakarta says diplomatic avenues remain and it is wrong even at this stage to portray war against Iraq as inevitable.

World's 'first' brain prosthesis revealed

The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.
The prosthesis will first be tested on tissue from rats' brains, and then on live animals. If all goes well, it will then be tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease.
Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and consciousness - parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Israeli bulldozer driver murders American peace activist



Rachel Corrie lies on the ground fatally injured by the Israeli bulldozer.

In Rafah, occupied Gaza, 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie from Olympia, Washington, was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver. Rachel was in Gaza opposing the bulldozing of a Palestinian home as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. Pictures show that the driver knowingly ran over her.

Suitcase surprise: Rebuke written on inspection notice





Seth Goldberg says that when he opened his suitcase in San Diego after a flight from Seattle this month, the two 'No Iraq War' signs he'd picked up at the Pike Place Market were still nestled among his clothes.
Tucked in his luggage was a card from the Transportation Security Administration notifying him that his bags had been opened and inspected at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Handwritten on the side of the card was a note, "Don't appreciate your anti-American attitude!"
"I found it chilling and a little Orwellian to have received this message," said the 41 year old New Jersey resident.

International women's human rights organization asks UN to declare US a threat to peace

'Free societies do not intimidate by cruelty and conquest' And other great quotes from Bush's UN speech on Iraq ... like "Our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions".

Cheney still paid by Pentagon's Iraq cleanup contractor

Halliburton, the Texas company which has been awarded the Pentagon's contract to put out potential oil-field fires in Iraq and which is bidding for postwar construction contracts, is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.
The payments, which appear on Mr Cheney's 2001 financial disclosure statement, are in the form of "deferred compensation" of up to $1m (600,000 pounds) a year.

Puzzling X-rays from Jupiter


Every 45 minutes a gigawatt pulse of x-rays courses through the solar system.
Astronomers are accustomed to such things. Distant pulsars and black holes often bathe the galaxy with blasts of x-radiation. But this time the source isn't exotic and far away. It's right here in our own solar system.
"The pulses are coming from the north pole of Jupiter," says Randy Gladstone, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and leader of the team that made the discovery using NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Assassination Prompts Serbian Emergency

Snipers assassinated Serbia's prime minister as he walked into government headquarters at midday Wednesday, silencing a pro-Western leader who helped topple Slobodan Milosevic and declared war on organized crime.
The slaying of Zoran Djindjic in downtown Belgrade prompted the government to impose a nationwide state of emergency amid fears the Balkan nation could plunge into a violent power struggle. The Cabinet declared three days of mourning.

Iraqis: "Smoking gun" made with duct tape


A remotely piloted aircraft that the United States has warned could spread chemical weapons appears to be made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellors attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker.
Iraqi officials took journalists to the Ibn Firnas State Company just north of Baghdad on Wednesday, where the drone's project director accused Secretary of State Colin Powell of misleading the U.N. Security Council and the public.
"He's making a big mistake," said Brig. Imad Abdul Latif. "He knows very well that this aircraft is not used for what he said."

The Great Dark Spot

"I was totally blown away when I saw it--a dark cloud twice as big as Earth swirling around Jupiter's north pole," says Bob West, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
West first saw it in an ultraviolet picture of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997. But it only appeared in one image out of many spanning a period of years.
"I didn't know what to make of it," he recalls. "The Great Dark Spot and the Great Red Spot are entirely different". The Great Red Spot is deep. "It's a high-pressure storm system rooted in Jupiter's troposphere far below the cloudtops. The Great Dark Spot is apparently shallow and confined to Jupiter's high stratosphere."

Why France Is America's True Friend

Outrageous dereliction of duty over Korea, obsessive warmongering against Iraq, crude, aggressive behaviour worthy of Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, threats against the UN, a $400-billion deficit that will infect the world with inflation, and damage to America's reputation - such are Bush's 'accomplishments' to date.
Far from being an enemy, France has been doing what a true good friend should do: telling Washington its policy is wrong and dangerous, unlike the handkissing leaders of Britain, Spain and Italy, who crave Bush's political support, or the East European coalition of the shilling, ex-communist politicians pandering to Washington for cash. Seventy percent of British, and 90% of Italians and Spaniards oppose Bush's crusade.

Birds of a feather aren’t the only ones to flock together

A new book argues that the universe is an orderly place marked by harmony and cooperation. In an era of war, terror and chaos, his viewpoint sounds a bit curious. But if 'Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order' is, well, out of sync with global news, it's certainly in tune with the scientific world.
Human affairs may be disorderly, but the rest of nature is humming along just fine, thanks to intrinsic properties that emphasize teamwork and synchrony from the atomic level up.

When gravity falls

Boeing this month told the press it is now using the work of "mad" Russian scientist Yevgeny Podkletnov - the world’s scientific community regards the Doc with grave misgivings, as they (including NASA) have been unable to reproduce any of his results.
In short, Podkletnov claims to have created a machine that can screen objects from the Earth's gravitational pull.
Boeing, a corporation not known for its flights of fancy, has engaged the services of Yevgeny’s team for its maximum security Phantom Works in Seattle, the semi-secret arm of the company which handles Boeing's most sensitive defence work. The program has been code-named Project Grasp (Gravity Suspension Propulsion).
George Muellner, the controller of the Phantom Works, confirmed with no less than the Jane's Defence Weekly (alias the bible of the wicked military industrial complex) that Boeing had seen enough in their own controlled environment, to convince them to pursue this avenue of research.

Ancient village raises Australian Aboriginal nomad questions

We're told that Australia's aborigines were nomads, yet the Gunditjmara people of Western Victoria claim their ancestors lived in a village. They had eel farms, and even an eel industry, which exported produce across the country. If this is true, it would challenge our current understanding of aboriginal history.
Archaeologist Dr Heather Builth set out to investigate the Gunditjmara's claims. Remarkably, she found a great deal of evidence to support them. The remains of hundreds of huts, more than 75 square kilometres of artificial channels and ponds for farming eels, and smoking trees for preserving the eels for export to other parts of Australia.

Pakistan Accused of Staging Bin Laden Aide Arrest

A grainy video purporting to show the arrest of two al Qaeda leaders has done little to deflect accusations that Pakistan may have staged this month's raid to give it leeway to abstain in a UN vote on an Iraq war.
On Monday, the powerful military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) held an unprecedented news conference to show foreign journalists what it said were images of a March 1 raid in Rawalpindi that netted al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Media Misquote and Excise Bush Comment About 'Scripted' Press Conference

When Bush gave his second prime-time press conference in two years (on 6 March 2003), in a flustered moment, he admitted that the production was "scripted." But in transcripts of the event, all media outlets, except one, have changed or removed that embarassing moment.
It happened when Bush was looking down at his notes to see which reporter he was supposed to call upon. The following excerpt is from the official transcript at the White House's Website:
The risk of doing nothing, the risk of hoping that Saddam Hussein changes his mind and becomes a gentle soul, the risk that somehow -- that inaction will make the world safer, is a risk I'm not willing to take for the American people.
We'll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted -- (laughter.)
Q Thank you, Mr. President. How would -- sir, how would you answer your critics who say that they think this is somehow personal?
You can confirm this for yourself by going to the transcript. The exchange is not quite halfway down the page. Also, you can listen to an MP3 of the exchange here.

Woman Offers Bush Crucifixion-For-Peace Deal

A New Zealand woman said on Wednesday she was willing to be crucified by President Bush if he pledges not to attack Iraq.
Mary Grierson said she had emailed the challenge to the White House and as an open letter to leading U.S. newspapers.
"Send your troops home and take me instead, on behalf of everyone in the world who does not want war and oppression," she wrote.

Photographic History of the Bush Administration Putting Its Mouth Where Its Money Isn't

The Bush Credibility Gap: Real Life Examples. A chronology of Bush saying one thing then doing another

War against Iraq is immoral: Hawke

The former Australian Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, says the prospective war against Iraq is immoral and stupid. Mr Hawke is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his election to office today.
He has told Lateline, there should be United Nation forces in Iraq.
"If they were there he would not be able to use weapons of mass destruction more so you'd be able to track them down do the job of isolating them, stopping them being made available to terrorists," he said.
"So if you can achieve those objectives other than by going to war it's immoral to go to war."

I'm losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush

I'm really excited by George Bush's latest reason for bombing Iraq: he's running out of patience. And so am I!
For some time now I've been really pissed off with Mr Johnson, who lives a couple of doors down the street. Well, him and Mr Patel, who runs the health food shop. They both give me queer looks, and I'm sure Mr Johnson is planning something nasty for me, but so far I haven't been able to discover what. I've been round to his place a few times to see what he's up to, but he's got everything well hidden. That's how devious he is.

Welcome to the New American Century (read 'New World Order')

The Project for the New American Century intends, through issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world.
PNAC is a think-tank founded in 1997 by the people who are now closest to President Bush - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and so on. What PNAC thinks is likely what George W. Bush thinks. PNAC represents the thinking of the men now in power in the US.

Pakistan's intelligence chief has terrorist links

Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre.
The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 was wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd.

Saturday's Al Qaeda arrest may have happened several months ago

Some analysts questioned whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had actually been arrested on Saturday and speculated he may have been held for some time.
"I think he was arrested several months ago in the shootout in Karachi," one expert on Pakistan who declined to be identified said, referring to a gunbattle in September in the southern port city that netted another Al Qaeda figure, Ahmed Omar Abdel Rahman, known as Binalshibh.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was reported to have narrowly evaded capture in that battle, when Karachi police identified him as a man hit by a police sniper.
But a suspected militant later denied this.
Another terror expert said several weeks ago he believed Mohammed had been arrested and that he expected the news would be only be made public when it was in the interests of the United States and Pakistan.

US concentration camps in the making


Photos taken close to Nellis Air Force Base (next to Union Pacific Railroad Tracks & I-15).

Gulf War vet admits setting Kuwait oil well fires under UN command

During the past six years, the American Gulf War Veterans Association has received numerous reports from veterans stating that US forces were responsible for the setting of the oil well fires at the end of the Gulf War.
One veteran has now stepped forward and given a detailed account of how he and others in special teams, moved forward of the front, behind enemy lines ahead of US forces, set explosive and incendiary charges on the well heads, and remained hidden until after the charges were remotely detonated and US forces advanced beyond their position.
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