"Bigfoot" a biological fact?




"The existence of multiple independent examples of footprint casts spanning three decades and thousands of miles, each displaying consistently distinct dermatoglyphics constitutes significant affirmative evidence for the presence of an unrecognized North American Ape."

New digging to probe mystery of ancient Sanxingdui ruins

Archeologists will launch a large-scale excavation at the Sanxingdui Ruins in southwest China's Sichuan Province this year to probe the mysteries of a lost civilization dating back more than 3,000 years.
Sanxingdui, which is listed among China's top 10 archaeologicalfindings of the 20th century, has long been suspected to be the remains of the ancient Shu Kingdom that suddenly disappeared in southwest China between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.
Three different ancient civilizations that developed separatelyare still enigmas for archeologists, while the exact meanings of the bronzes and masks remains unknown to archeologists at home andabroad.
Some have held that an alien species might be the answer. A previous report quoted the locals as saying that the ruins were visited by an unidentified flying object (UFO) in December 2000.

Bush, the Amazon rainforest and a gas pipeline to enrich his friends

President George Bush is seeking funds for a controversial project to drive gas pipelines from pristine rainforests in the Peruvian Amazon to the coast.
The plan will enrich some of Mr Bush's closest corporate campaign contributors while risking the destruction of rainforest, threatening its indigenous peoples and endangering rare species on the coast.
Among the beneficiaries would be two Texas energy companies with close ties to the White House, Hunt Oil and Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Vice-President Dick Cheney's old company, Haliburton, which is rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure.

Chirac responds to claims of ill-health from nuclear testing

French President Chirac says there's been no recorded incidence of any radiation levels - significantly higher than those which occur naturally - due to France's atomic blasting in the Pacific.
People from Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls have held protests during the President's visit, to demand France recognise the effects to health caused by the testing.
John Taroanui Doom, of Moruroa e Tatou, says "for two years we are asking to open the archives to know the truth on the problems of health of our people who were at Moruroa."
Meanwhile, the BBC reported a couple of months ago that recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with unusually high concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their urine. International monitors have called it almost conclusive evidence that the U.S. used a new kind of uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.

Salt controls size of DNA structures, could improve gene therapy

Researchers have found they can control the size of densely packed DNA structures by changing the salt concentration in solutions containing DNA. The finding could improve the efficiency of gene delivery for medical treatment and disease prevention.
Scientists are seeking to understand the natural mechanism of DNA condensation into nanostructures – in particular, toroids, which look like tightly wound garden hoses. Densely packed DNA is nature's efficient way of transporting genetic information, done particularly well by sperm cells and viruses.

New theory: catastrophe created Mars' moons

The two moons of Mars -- Phobos and Deimos -- could be the byproducts of a breakup of a huge moon that once circled the red planet, according to a new theory.
The capture of a large Martian satellite may have taken place during or shortly after the formation of the planet, with Phobos and Deimos now the surviving remnants.
Origin of the two moons presents a longstanding puzzle to which one researcher proposed the new solution at the 6th International Conference on Mars, held here last week.
"Nobody has been able to explain the origin of Phobos and Deimos," said S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and the president of the Arlington (Virginia)-based Science & Environmental Policy Project, a non-profit policy institute.

Canadian duo step closer to proving existence of mysterious dark matter

A pair of Canadian astronomers and an American scientist have for the first time measured the shape and size of dark matter surrounding galaxies and its effect on light emitted from more distant sources - findings that tip the scale in favour of the existence of the mysterious substance.
The existence of dark matter has been hotly debated among astronomers for years. It's believed to comprise about 25 per cent of the total mass of the universe, with the rest consisting of normal matter (five per cent) and dark energy (70 per cent). Dark energy is believed to push particles apart, contributing to the expansion of the universe.
Some astronomers have developed theories based on the assumption that dark matter doesn't exist, and consequently, have suggested changing the law of gravity. The new measurements refute those theories, says Howard Yee, a professor at the University of Toronto who began the research with his colleagues in 1999.

Small galaxy springs 'dark matter' surprises

In a dwarf spheroidal, found in the constellation Ursa Minor, a team of astronomers has found a clump of slow-moving stars near a galactic centre. They interpreted this clump as the remains of a group of stars known as a globular cluster.
This group of stars flies in the face of the most popular model for how dark matter is distributed in galaxies.
The 'lambda cold dark matter' model, which explains very well the large-scale structures in the Universe, predicts that dark matter rapidly increases in density towards the centre of a galaxy.
If dark matter were distributed in this way in the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy, the star cluster would have been dispersed. The cluster's existence shows that the dark matter is in fact distributed differently in this galaxy.

Bush administration's Top 40 Lies about war and terrorism

1)The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.
2)The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.
3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.
4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.
And the list goes on...

Dr Gonzo is at it again...

The real shocker of the week, for me, was and remains the stunning collapse of the evil Bush administration, which I view with mixed feelings.
"The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families."

Patent describes how video monitors can be used to manipulate and control humans

Certain monitors can emit electromagnetic field pulses that excite a sensory resonance in a nearby subject, through image pulses that are so weak as to be subliminal. This is unfortunate since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else's purposes. Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online, or while watching TV, a video, or a DVD.US Patent number 6,506,148 Abstract:

Israel recognizes 'Black Hebrews': American group given permanent resident status

Israel's 'Black Hebrews,' a close-knit group of vegan polygamists who arrived in the country from the United States in 1969, are celebrating the government's announcement that they are finally eligible for citizenship in the Jewish state.
In the desert town of Dimona in southern Israel, home to about 1,500 Black Hebrews, there was a feeling Monday that a 34-year history of statelessness was coming to an end with news of their permanent resident status.
About 350 black Americans left the United States in 1967 as followers of Ben Carter, a Chicago bus driver who changed his name to Ben Ammi Ben-Israel after receiving, he said, a visitation from the angel Gabriel informing him he was God's representative on Earth.

Bonsai: Australian PM's new handle

[Well he is a mini-Bush after all ...]

While George Bush's government is viewed as an international pariah by most of Europe and much of the rest of the world, at least one country remains doggedly enthusiastic about being America's loyal sidekick: Australia.
Like the weakling who echoes the words of the playground bully as their big pal pushes people around, Australian ministers have been busy providing supportive background squeaks for each of Bush's recent international initiatives.

Guantanamo detainees' Australian father campaigns in NY:

Terry Hicks, the father of Guantanamo Bay detaine, David Hicks, has been retracing his son's steps through Afghanistan and Pakistan and he says he's now convinced that his son was not a member of al-Qaeda.
He admits David may have trained with the organization, but stresses he would have received only military training, not terrorist training.
Terry Hicks made the distinction as he took his protest about his son's imprisonment to the streets of New York City"

[Reports are that Mr Hicks was getting a lot of abuse from passers bye. Comments were typified by the following: "I'd like to see him try to do this in front of a fire house and see what happens, and down near ground zero. His son has finally got some (inaudible) it's too bad".]

New technique to establish ancient fossil age

T.C. Partridge and R.J. Clarke, researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, were confronted with a mixed blessing when, in 1997, they discovered a nearly complete skeleton of what appeared to be an Australopithecus buried in the sediments on the floor of the Sterkfontein cave in central South Africa. The fossil was well preserved, but its age was uncertain. It was more than 2 million years old, but how much more? The answer to that question would affect theories of how and when Australopithecus spread through Africa.
"Their initial estimate of 3.3 million years provoked a lot of controversy," Granger said. "Few thought that Australopithecus had traveled so far so long ago, and scientists wanted more proof. If the estimate was accurate, it might require a rethinking of human prehistory."
A firmer answer would require the innovative use of a particle accelerator half a world away at Purdue in Indiana, where Granger was using radioactive isotopes in sediment to determine the age of rivers and caves.
Dating fossils by examining the minute quantities of radioactive elements they contain is not a new technique in archaeology. Carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that slowly decays as centuries pass, has been a common benchmark for dating many human fossils; the more carbon-14 has decayed in a sample, the older it must be. The speed at which carbon-14 decays, called its half-life, is only 5,730 years. This means that after a few millennia, the isotope is no longer useful to mark a fossil's age.
"Once your fossil is older than 50,000 years, its carbon-14 is nearly gone," Granger said. "We knew the South African fossils were at least 2 million years old, so it was clear we needed another way to establish their age."
Granger, a physics major as an undergraduate, eventually became an earth scientist when he developed an interest in studying the age and changes in mountains and river beds, geological formations that are often many millions of years old. Rather than use carbon-14 to date his landscapes, he looked for isotopes with far longer half-lives - and found them in aluminum-26 and beryllium-10. These elements often form in common quartz when it is on the Earth's surface and exposed to cosmic rays.
"When radiation from outer space strikes silicon and oxygen atoms in a quartz crystal, they split into aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, both of which have half-lives of around a million years," Granger said. "Because they decay so slowly, they allow you to reach back much further in history than you can using carbon-14."
The use of aluminum and beryllium for radiometric dating had only been around for a few years when Granger began to use it on cave sediments. The technique was not widely known outside geological circles, so when he heard about the Australopithecus discovery, he contacted the South African scientists who found the skeleton and asked if he could be of assistance.
"It was the first time this method had been used to determine the age of something that had been alive," Granger said. "But based on the evidence, we found that the fossil was even older than the initial estimate."
Granger and Caffee, of Purdue's physics department, analyzed samples of the skeleton in Purdue's accelerator mass spectrometer, a device capable of detecting the infinitesimal quantities of radioactive aluminum and beryllium in the samples.
"We found that the skeleton was between 3.5 and 4.5 million years old," Granger said. "That's admittedly quite a large window of possibility, but even if it's on the young side, it still puts Australopithecus in southern Africa far earlier than expected."
The significance for anthropologists would be the possibility that mankind's earliest ancestors were a different species than scientists generally believe.

Bush's kindy teacher warns folks about delusional personality trait

Kindergarten Evaluation: George W. Bush, 1951
George is one of the most delightful children we've ever met. And what a creative imagination! We're all certain George will be a terrific artist or writer, he is so inventive. However, he seems to be having trouble distinguishing between what he wishes would happen, and what has really happened. Of course, in the creative arts, this can be a lifelong source of inspiration. But we're a little worried that if George chooses a different path, it could lead to trouble. We suggest Mom and Dad try to gently explain the difference between what we wish would be true, and what is actually true!

Hicks denies son trained as terrorist


Terry Hicks, the father of Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks, admits his son may have received military training with Al Qaeda but not terrorist training.
Terry Hicks stood inside a wire cage near Broadway, one of Manhattan's busiest streets, to highlight the conditions he says his son is experiencing at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Mr Hicks is meeting with US lawyers to discuss plans for his son's trial.
David Hicks has not been charged yet but is one of six detainees being considered for the first military tribunals.

New season's strange fruit?

Not long after the family of Feraris "Ray" Golden found his dead body dangling from a tree outside his grandmother's home, ugly suspicions began to surface.
Friends say Golden was dating a white policeman's daughter in this rural farming community of about 15,000, divided almost equally between black and white residents.
The uneasiness after his death in May became so rampant that NAACP leaders called for an inquest into the lynching rumors.

CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat

A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.
The ad-hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary view of the intelligence.

Thousands being recruited for 'jihad'

"Jihad is spreading like wildfire in Pakistan," claims an official in the country's Interior Ministry. He says that according to several jihadi publications between January and June 2003, Islamic groups recruited over 7,000 young boys aged between 18 and 25.
"Some of the largest separatist outfits – Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) andJaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) – claim to have recruited more than 3,350 and 2,235 boys respectively during this period," says the official.
Jihadi groups are finding the Pakistani environment particularly receptive after the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. They use publications, web sites, local prayer leaders, cassettes, CDs, and souvenirs like file covers, badges,T-shirts and so on to lure recruits.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Con doleezza Rice: changing her mind, it's a woman's perogative

Condoleezza Rice is the nation’s top national security official. After September 11th, she claimed that the White House had no prior knowledge that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack planes in a terrorist attack. That assertion was proven false.
In the months before the Iraq War, Rice repeatedly reassured the public that the U.S. was seeking a peaceful resolution, and that war was not a foregone conclusion. However, it now appears that at the same time she was saying this, she was telling senior State Department officials that the decision to go to war had already been made – well before diplomatic efforts to diffuse the situation even began.
Most recently, it appears that she has given three separate, incongruent stories about her role in the massive intelligence breakdown that led to the White House making false statements about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities.
It appears that Rice has either been misleading the public about her role in that fiasco, or alternately, has been grossly negligent in not reading the government’s most important intelligence documents.

US warned it faces 'third Gulf war' in Iraq



Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983. One year previous the US provided billions in aid to Saddam for weapons to be used to kill Iranians.

Terms of engagement

It's very difficult keeping up with Mideast news due to the Orwellian newspeak coming from Washington. So here's a handy list of key terms, translated into simple English: Herewith, definitions to keep on top of current events

Anti-terrorism - State terrorism.[...]
Canadians - A bunch of pot-smoking, pinko, wimp nancy boys who marry their best friends and refuse to obey orders from the Great White Father in Washington.
Coalition - The U.S. and British invaders, plus some troops from rent-a-nations like Romania and Poland. In the past, "the coalition" would have been called imperial forces and mercenary auxiliaries.
Dictator - A ruler you don't like, or who does not cooperate.
French - Insubordinate ingrates and depraved chain-smokers who had the nerve to try to block the jolly little war in Iraq, and now sneer, "we told you so."
Germans - Untrustworthy. Just when you order them to be warlike again, they go soft. Wait until they see the next dozen WWII epics from Hollywood.
Homeland security - bolting the barn door after the horse has escaped by rounding up Muslims and denying them due process of law.
Islam - An evil faith that promotes violence and hatred, as proven by the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who learned about the agents of the devil while encountering them in motel rooms.[...]
Liberation - Invasion.
Stability - when things go the way Uncle Sam likes, ie., the status quo.[...]
Statesman - A cooperative dictator.
Terrorism - violent acts by dangerous fanatics and malcontents who refuse to accept the downtrodden status assigned to them by Washington.
Torture - a foul act committed by your enemies. When your side does it, it's called intensive interrogation in Guantanamo.

African dictators take leaf out of Bush book

State radio in the tiny west African state of Equatorial Guinea has hailed the nation's leader as "the country's God".
In a programme called Bidze-Nduan (Bury the fire) which deals with "peace, tranquillity and the order reigning in the country" the radio declared that President Teodoro Obiang Nguema was "in permanent contact with the Almighty".
It said that the president was "like God in heaven" who has "all power over men and things".
"He can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell because it is God himself, with whom he is in permanent contact, and who gives him this strength," a presidential aide announced on the show.

[Perhaps the president has been getting tips from US counterpart George W Bush who was quoted in Israel's newspaper Ha'aretz as saying: "God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."]

Turning the dearly departed into diamonds   

What is a LifeGem? A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
The LifeGem diamond is more than a memorial to visit on the weekends… it is a way to embrace your loved one's memory day by day.  The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.
We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does.  Forever.

Giant meteorite wrecked forest

A giant meteorite that struck the Irkutsk region of Siberia last September had the force of a nuclear bomb of medium power and devastated a huge area of taiga, Russian scientists reported on Friday.
A 10-strong expedition of scientists and doctors was unable to identify and reach the place where the meteorite landed until mid-May. It was finally located in the very remote, wooded semi-mountainous region of Bodaibo, northeast of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal.
"Over an area of 100 square kilometres trees were smashed in a pattern characteristic of very powerful blast effects," expedition leader Vadim Chernobrov told a news conference.
He said that the meteorite had disintegrated before hitting the ground and had left about 20 craters, up to 20 metres in diameter, with an explosion "equivalent to the power of an atomic bomb of medium size".

Senators say Pentagon plan allows betting on terrorism, assassinations

A Pentagon plan to allow people to bet on the likelihood of terrorist attacks and political assassinations has been described as ridiculous and grotesque.
Traders could bet on the chances that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be assassinated, whether North Korea will launch a missile attack and other events. The market is intended to help the Pentagon examine the likelihood of these events.
Democratic Senators Byron Dorgan and Ron Wyden say the program needs to be shut down.
Wyden says the idea "of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque." Dorgan calls the proposal unbelievably stupid.
The program would be a joint effort by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and two private companies.
That agency has come under fire for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance project that has raised privacy concerns.
Wyden says the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Admiral John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Iraqis want proof of death of Saddam's sons

If Uday and Qusay are not proven to be dead the chaos, disorder and troubles will continue. This would encourage those people who support the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraqi people wouldn't believe Uday and Qusay are dead until they see their faces on television.
The Commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, says four former top Ba'ath leaders, already in US custody, identified the bodies. X-rays and dental records were also used to determine their identities.

Hunter S. Thompson is back, and he's not happy

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Naked women hunted with paintball guns by camo-clad cads



It's a new form of adult entertainment, and men are paying thousands of dollars to shoot naked women with paint ball guns. They're coming to Las Vegas to do it. This bizarre new sport has captured the attention of people around the world.
"I've done this three times," says Nicole, one of the three women allowing themselves to be shot at. Two other women, Gidget and Skyler, claim they have done this seven times.
Hunting for Bambi is the brainchild of Michael Burdick. Men pay anywhere from $5000 to $10,000 for the chance to come to the middle of the desert to shoot what they call "Bambis" with a paint ball gun. Burdick says men have come from as far away as Germany. The men get a video tape of their hunt to take home and show their friends.
Burdick says hunters are told not to shoot any woman above the chest, but he admits not all hunters follow the rules. "The main goal is to be as true to nature as possible. I don't go deer hunting and see a deer with a football helmet on so I don't want to see one on my girl either," said Burdick.
So why does a woman agree to strip down and run around the desert dodging paint balls? Nicole says it's good money. "I mean it's $2,500 if you don't get hit. You try desperately not to and it's $1000 if you do," said Nicole.
The men and women say this is all good, clean fun, but in Part 2 of this special report, reporter LuAnne Sorrell speaks with a psychologist who says for some men playing out this sexual aggression may lead to other more violent acts against women.

Although there is talk that this is all a PR stunt to promote a sleazy video the idea has its roots in a classic short story by Richard Connell called "The Most Dangerous Game". It also appears in testimony from alleged mind-control victims who say they were used for sport in this way with the hunters being members of the upper crust.
One of alleged mind-control victim Cathy O'Brien's more vivid tales involves Dick Cheney while he was Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford.
Cathy described Cheney's participation in human hunts inspired by Connell's book.
According to O'Brien, Cheney would hunt CIA sex slaves, which included herself, on private property. When he would catch his prey, he would sexually violate the victims as celebration.

Levitation is raising eyebrows--and interest at NASA

At least two scientists theorize that the apparent weight loss is real. Giovanni Modanese, a physicist at the Italian National Agency for Nuclear & High Energy Physics in Trento, agrees antigravity is unlikely--but a ''gravity shield'' is something else. It would produce an unseen tunnel above the disk, and inside it things would weigh less because exotic quantum-physics reactions would be absorbing some of gravity's pull.
Ning Li, a senior research scientist at the University of Alabama's Huntsville campus, believes that under the proper conditions, the minuscule force fields of superconducting atoms can ''couple,'' compounding in strength to the point where they can produce antigravity. Li and Modanese have been debating each other since the early 1990s, when Eugene E. Podkletnov, a Russian materials scientist then at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, reported strange gravity-attenuation effects in his experiments. (A 1997 article from Business Week Online).

South Aral Sea 'gone in 15 years'

 The Aral Sea is disappearing even faster than previously thought, with a new study of the southern part of the sea slashing its life expectancy by decades.
Since the 1960s, the sea has been drying up as a result of poor management of irrigation channels that steal water from rivers feeding it. Once the area of Ireland, it is now a quarter that size and broken into two fragments - the North Aral Sea and South Aral Sea (see map).
Because of the costs involved, only the smaller North Aral has been earmarked for rescue (New Scientist print edition, 4 January 2003), and several dams to stem water loss from it have been build since the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, the South Aral has been abandoned, and as it dries up it is wreaking havoc on the environment. It is leaving behind vast salt plains, transforming the climate with hotter summers and colder winters, destroying what remains of local fisheries, and producing massive dust storms that spread disease.

Tenet: Wolfowitz Did It

When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and other high-profile hawks, rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the intelligence committee.
Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons.

"White House officials said the document [the main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq's weapons program partly declassified Friday] was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department's skepticism. The president 'is not a fact checker,' the official said. [...]

Hours before he died, Kelly told of 'dark actors playing games'

David Kelly wrote of "many dark actors playing games" in an email sent just hours before his death.
Dr Kelly, The New York Times reported yesterday, sent the message to an unnamed journalist saying he wanted to wait "until the end of the week" before judging how his appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee had gone.
When put in the context of earlier conversations with the reporter, the paper concluded the "dark actors" seemed to be a reference to officials from the Ministry of Defence and British intelligence agencies "with whom he had often sparred over interpretations of intelligence reports".
But the government scientist had also sent a "combative" email to Professor Alastair Hay, a friend who had expressed the hope that he was dealing with the pressure, in which he "expressed a determination to overcome the scandal encircling him and an enthusiasm about returning to Iraq". "Hopefully it will soon pass and I will get back to Baghdad and get on with the real job," the email said.

Electronic voting machines: making tampering even easier

An apparent exposé of a huge security flaw in the United States voting system. Computer-savvy minds are still debating the significance of what appeared on the Scoop website. So far, the mainstream US media have ignored the Scoop story, but it ignited fierce debate across the Internet, drew huge traffic to the Scoop site, and fed increasing controversy over electronic voting machines.
Think of the US and the overwhelming image is of a president who got fewer votes than his rival, yet still got the top job thanks to massive confusion in the state in which his brother is governor.
Last year President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which will provide almost $6.8 billion to states to buy new electronic voting machines. By next year, many US voters will cast their ballot on controversial touch-screen machines, which don't provide a paper audit trail, owned by a small number of private companies who keep their software secret.
US writer named Bev Harris, author of a soon-to-be published book called Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century discovered a public file transfer site that contained up to 40,000 files, including manuals, source codes, and a vote counting system that she and Thompson say contains a trapdoor that could allow someone to alter the data.

Bush Administration is major roadblock for the 9-11 Commission. Why?

President George W. Bush is obstructing the investigation of the 9-11 terrorist attack against the United States. Ever since the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also called the 9-11 Commission, had been set up to investigate the biggest crime of the twenty-first century, Bush and his administration have kept getting in its way.
Bush's obstruction of the investigation began coming into focus last March when Time Magazine reported that the White House brushed off a request made by the 9-11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, to boost his budget by $11 million. Kean had sought the funding as part of the $75 billion supplemental spending bill that the president had just requested to pay for the war with Iraq. Bush's refusal to increase the commission's budget frustrated and angered a number of the members on the 9-11 panel.
In denying the request, the White House perplexed members of the commission. "This is very counterproductive if the White House's intention is to prevent the commission from being politicized, because it will look like they have something to hide," said a Republican member of the commission.

The thirty-six lies that launched a war

An interesting compilation of quotes -- mainly from the UK -- detailing the coalition of the willing's reasons for going into Iraq and why those reasons are spurious.

eg: "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, 7 October 2002
This claim was repeatedly rubbished by the International Atomic Energy Agency, who observed that the tubes were being used for artillery rockets, but the US administration kept making it. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges.
Click here for an alternative link.

Hicks FOI request 'would risk US relations'

The Federal Government says it rejected a freedom of information (FOI) request about communication with the United States over David Hicks because it might damage Australia's relationship with the US.
Mr Hicks has been detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for 18 months, since his capture as an "enemy combatant" in Afghanistan.
He is one of two Australians held in the Guantanamo Bay facility, along with Mamdouh Habib.
The US has put plans for Mr Hicks's trial on hold, pending talks with Australia this week.
Defence Minister Robert Hill says under the FOI act, the Government is not obliged to release the information the Australian newspaper is seeking.
"The point to stress is that this is an ongoing matter and it would be extremely unusual to reveal the ongoing relationship and negotiations between governments whilst that is in fact occurring," he said.

Psychic link to Lockerbie bomb probe

The CIA used psychics to investigate the Lockerbie bombing and reconstruct images of the baggage container said to have held the bomb that caused PanAm Flight 103 to explode.
Declassified documents obtained by the Sunday Herald reveal the extraordinary attempts that were made to glean vital clues relating to Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity – 270 people died when PanAm Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in December 1988.
The 26-page report is an insight into the now decommissioned Star Gate programme, a $20m CIA initiative which ran from 1972 to the mid-1990s.
It was launched with the aim of training individuals to gather intelligence information by “transcending the boundaries of space and time” through their minds.

Pentagon seeking private security firm to police Iraq

With large parts of Iraq still gripped by lawlessness and guerrilla warfare, the Pentagon is planning to hire a private security firm to arm and train thousands of former Iraqi soldiers to guard government buildings, pipelines and other important installations.
The Pentagon has been in talks with the private security firm Kroll to train the former soldiers to take over duties at spots now guarded by US soldiers. The guards would carry small-arms and be responsible for security at up to 2,000 sites.
Although the US has 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon admits their presence has been stretched thin, the lack of numbers exacerbated by an unexpected level of resistance from Iraqi fighters. About 150 US soldiers have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq with the toll rising almost every day.
A report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, whose experts travelled to Iraq at the request, and expense, of the Pentagon, explicitly criticised the Bush administration for not more fully involving the international community and the United Nations in the postwar reconstruction. "The scope of the challenges, the financial requirements, and rising anti-Americanism in parts of Iraq argue for a new coalition that includes countries and organisations beyond the original war-fighting coalition," it said.

Oral polio vaccination conducted in Africa -- Ugandan kids die by 1000s

Several years ago Kihura Nkuba -- founder of Greater African Radio and president of the East African World Broadcasters Association, and director of the Pan-African Center for Strategic and International Studies -- began hearing from villagers who were being subjected to repeated forced live oral polio vaccinations despite reports of injuries and death among the children.
On his radio program he began to speak out and questioned the safety of giving the children - especially children with HIV - so many live oral polio vaccinations, rather than giving them the safer "killed" polio vaccine used in the U.S. and Canada.
Since that time, he tells me, he has been persecuted by the government, World Health Organization and UNICEF, and his radio station has been driven into bankruptcy. Kihura appeared at great personal and professional risk to tell his story.

Faked intelligence on Iraq just the tip of the iceberg: senator

A leading Democrat in Congress accused the White House Tuesday of a broad pattern of dissembling in making its case for waging war on Iraq.
Carl Levin, senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, refuted White House claims that now-discredited reports that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Africa was an isolated case of Washington using dodgy pre-war intelligence.
"The misleading statement about African uranium is not an isolated incident. There is a significant amount of troubling evidence that it was part of a pattern of exaggerations and misleading statements," he said.

Icebound telescope probes the Universe

From beneath the Antarctic ice, astronomers have been able to detect neutrinos - particles that trace the most violent events in the cosmos, many of them yet to be explained.
Sensors in the ice have detected the rare and fleeting flashes of light caused when neutrinos interact with the ice.
Researchers say it is just the beginning in the opening of a new window on the Universe. Past experience has shown that when new technologies like this are developed, many surprises emerge.
Amanda 2 (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array - 2) is designed to look not up, but down, through the Earth to the sky of the Northern Hemisphere.
It comprises 677 glass optical modules, each the size of a bowling ball, arrayed on 19 cables set deep in the ice forming a cylinder 500 metres in height and 120 metres in diameter.
The glass modules detect streaks of light created as neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice.
The map it has produced has been unveiled at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Sydney, Australia. It provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos.
In the future, the hunt for the sources of cosmic neutrinos will get a boost as Amanda 2 grows in size as new strings of detectors are added. Current plans are for the detector to grow to a cubic kilometre of instrumented ice that will be known as IceCube.

Magnetic anomaly in US agriglyphs

Crop circles which appeared in a Knobel, AR, wheat field on June 7 near a small cemetery got big attention. A group form Boston that studies crop circles around the world even made a trek to the tract of land, twice. BLT researchers said soil samples show magnetic levels 9 times higher than before the circles.
According to a report by Nancy Talbott, one of BLT's founders described it as a "mini-triple Julia formation." The center circle was around 31 feet in diameter, with three circles in each "arm" of decreasing sizes down to eight feet in diameter. Circles in arms spaced approximately 10 feet apart had a slight curvature clockwise, according to the research. Crop lay was reported to have been clockwise in all circles.
She took soil samples from the location where the formations were found and control samples some 500 feet away from the site.
"These samples yielded the highest concentration of magnetic material ever reported by the BLT Team in a crop circle," Talbott reported. While normal soils seldom exceed 0.4 milligrams of magnetic material per gram of soil, the soil at Knobel measured 30.29 mg, the report stated.
"The fact that under the microscope we can see both spherical and partially ablated particles here, the fact that there were no magnetic particles found in the control soils, and the fact that the concentration in the circle samples was so great, all indicate that this formation was not mechanically-flattened" Talbott said.
The research team has hypothesized that microscopic particles of meteoric iron which are entering the earth's atmosphere constantly as meteors burn up in the upper atmosphere. Those particles get drawn into a descending plasma vortex system.
"The idea is that the meteoric debris is both drawn into the descending plasma vortex by its strong magnetic field and then heated to a molten state by the microwaves emitted by the spiraling plasma," Talbott wrote in the report. "The molten, and now magnetized particles then form spheres and particles with partially rounded surfaces as they cool on the way down to the earth's surface and are left in the soil in the crop circle area as the plasma vortex impacts the field.
Talbott also noted that interviews with witnesses revealed that energy was emanating upwards to at least 800 feet above the formation.

Mysterious Smoke Ring: New Details Emerge



A bizarre sighting in San Antonio's skies started. On a rainy day a smoke ring appeared in the sky.
“It looked like smoke, but it was a perfect circle,” said Chuck Fehlis. “A mushroom cloud - dark gray… developed right above it,” said Rod Snowden. “It began to grow, grow, grow,” said Kelly Snowden. “It was actually sort of scary." People watched - transfixed.
Yolanda Young also saw the ring of smoke. She heard a crack of thunder, and saw the smoke from her office. “I looked out and saw a black trail of smoke and above it was this complete black smoke ring,” Yolanda said. “It was rising higher and getting stretched out.”

Officials say this was the result of a lightening strike but have a look at the following series of photos from a 1950s magazine, allegedly taken by a soldier at a military base with a Brownie camera.



The article said that "ring shaped UFOs" were a rarity, but not unknown and that these photos were the first record of such phenomena. Further:
"On many occasions, UFOs are reported to become gradually engulfed in a vapor cloud. The fully developed cloud then looks like any other cloud in the sky and affords the UFO a very convenient "hiding place."
"The series of photos made by the army private shows not only the rare ring object, but also shows it gradually becoming engulfed in a vapor cloud."
The photos were taken in September of 1957. It was around 9 in the morning and the private was working inside when several other men started yelling for him to come outside and see the strange thing that was coming overhead. He rushed outside and, seeing the estimated 60 ft diameter object, went to his car and retrieved his camera to take the photos. The sequence was taken within about a minute since the vapor cloud developed within an estimated 60 seconds.
Later, after discussing the object with his fellow soldiers, the private thought that it might have been some sort of secret army experiment and he ought not to have photographed it, so he determined to say nothing to keep from getting in any kind of trouble. The photos were only turned over to NICAP ten years later.
Prints were made and sent to Dr. James E. McDonald, atmospheric physicist, and Professor Charles A. Maney, mathematician and physicist. Dr. McDonald was, according to the article, extremely interested in the photos and contacted the army private for further information. Professor Maney had some interesting comments to make about it since he had investigated a mysterious double ring of a very similar nature that had been seen on March 31, 1952 by Mr. Charles Early.

Strange Provisions in East African Anti-Terrorism Bill

Governments round the world, including the Kenya government, have been under pressure to support the US war on terror. Now Kenya has come up with a strange piece called the Suppression of Terrorism Bill, which Ng'ang'a Thiong'o says violates even some of the most basic legal principles.
Naveed Anwar Mohammed was arrested on June 28, 2003 at Garissa and held in police custody for nine days over suspicions that he was a terrorist. He was released without charges and will now have to wait for years for compensation.

Nuclear weapons 'option' for Australia


AUSTRALIA is giving itself the option of becoming a nuclear power through a deal with the US to obtain nuclear weapons and extensive investment in atomic expertise, it has been claimed.
Options: Lucas Heights reactor, and nuclear detonation
A leading strategic policy expert says Australia is forging an understanding with the US that would ensure quick access to "off the shelf" tactical nuclear weapons during a crisis.

Some parents don't like U.S. flag at school



Some parents in a southern Oregon town are protesting plans of the local school district to erect a flagpole and U.S. flag outside a taxpayer-supported learning center, reports the Ashland Daily Tidings.
"I feel very strongly that there should not be a flagpole and there should not be a flag," Tracy Bungay told the paper.
"I feel our country is on a strong push towards imperialism, and we're not a democratic nation anymore. I want to raise my children to be citizens of the world, and the flag does not represent ideals I want to instill in my children. It represents dominance, greed, corporate power and not freedom. I think it even represents commercialism and consumerism."

Capitalists just aren't what they used to be

Properly understood, fascism and communism were, as the Soviet and German labels openly declared, actually the same thing:, just two varieties of socialism. The fascist praises the free market, but secretly works to destroy it. The communist condemns the free market and openly works to destroy it. Both tactics are tools of a monopolistic type of parasitism known as socialism. The key goal in either case is the destruction of economic market competition so that certain ruthless individuals can acquire huge wealth and power. The wars between the fascists and the communists in the 20th century have simply been wars fought between competing monopolists. [...]
Capitalism is good if government doesn't interfere or take sides. Such does not exist anywhere in the world today. Capitalism becomes something else that is very bad (and is not even capitalism anymore) when government interferes with competition and takes the side of various corporate elites.
And now we get to the "C" word: conspiracy. It is my belief that corporate monopolists like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Morgan, the Du Ponts, the Vanderbilts and other infamous "robber barons" here and in Europe (where it all began with the Rothchilds and English royalty) actually created and maintained communism in the Soviet Union.
At work is what is known as the "Hegelian Principle." There are three parts to this technique. First you create the thesis. This is usually a problem that is created by government meddling. The thesis in this case was naked monopolistic capitalism, the bared fang, no-holds-barred type that John D. Rockefeller wielded. The masses get rather angry at some point. They don't like the big boys taking over the whole block.
So, now you create the solution to the problem that you had created earlier. This solution is called the anti-thesis. You finance a twisted megalomaniac by the name of Lenin to cook up a political dogma (based upon the ideas of Karl Marx...who was funded by European industrialists) that attacks your thesis and offers something as bad or worse in its place. [...] After awhile, the masses reject the anti-thesis. You have the so-called "fall" of communism. [...]
This isn't good news. It means the return of a feudal system to the entire globe. It pretends to be the illuminated New World Order, but it will be a New Dark Age unlike anything mankind has ever known. That is...unless we stop it.

Rumsfeld out to unshackle the military

The United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is pushing a series of sweeping proposals that will weaken congressional supervision of the Pentagon and give the military more freedom to manage itself.
The Pentagon has proposed eliminating requirements for filing hundreds of reports on its activities to Congress every year. It also plans to ban strikes by contract workers, axe rules protecting civilian workers at the Pentagon and to bypass environmentalists in Congress.
Some plans have been more provocative. They include allowing the Pentagon to send its initiatives directly to Capitol Hill before other agencies can review them.
Once there, the legislation would require Congress to vote quickly, with only limited debate.

The General Nobody Knows

It’s a blistering day on the plains of Colorado, and Gen. Ed Eberhart strides into his brand-new “situational awareness center” at Northern Command. Eberhart may be the most powerful man in America nobody has really heard of: he’s in charge of military deployments against domestic terror.
How should American soldiers behave when deployed among Americans?
Eberhart’s mantra is that Northcom doesn’t move until asked by local, state or federal civilian authorities -- but he knows Northcom has “a different mission set” than the other four U.S. regional commands around the globe.
Mainly, Eberhart is keen to show he’s sensitive to the deepest of American fears, that the military might wrest control from civilians. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bars U.S. troops from enforcing U.S. laws.
But, Harman adds, the Posse Comitatus ban “is not absolute. It’s like the First Amendment. You can’t cry fire in a crowded theater and you can’t always block the U.S. military on U.S. soil.”

EARTH CHANGES

Climate change may not be as gradual as we thought

Recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.
This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

The mind as a theatre ... of war

The term "psycho-terrorism" was coined by Russian writer N. Anisimov of the Moscow Anti-Psychotronic Center. According to Anisimov, psychotronic weapons are those that act to "take away a part of the information which is stored in a man's brain. It is sent to a computer, which reworks it to the level needed for those who need to control the man, and the modified information is then reinserted into the brain." These weapons are used against the mind to induce hallucinations, sickness, mutations in human cells, "zombification," or even death. Included in the arsenal are VHF generators, X-rays, ultrasound, and radio waves. Russian army Major I. Chernishev, writing in the military journal Orienteer in February 1997, asserted that "psy" weapons are under development all over the globe.
There is confirmation from US researchers that this type of study is going on. Dr. Janet Morris, coauthor of The Warrior's Edge, reportedly went to the Moscow Institute of Psychocorrelations in 1991. There she was shown a technique pioneered by the Russian Department of Psycho-Correction at Moscow Medical Academy in which researchers electronically analyze the human mind in order to influence it. They input subliminal command messages, using key words transmitted in "white noise" or music. Using an infra-sound, very low frequency transmission, the acoustic psycho-correction message is transmitted via bone conduction.

March of US fascism steps up to double-quick time

Frightened by Bush's rapidly accruing personal power and the Democrats' inability and/or unwillingness to stand up to him, panicked lefties worry that he might use the "war on terrorism" as an excuse to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties and jail political opponents.
To these people, whether or not the 2004 elections actually take place as scheduled is the ultimate test for American democracy. At Guantánamo Bay the United States is converting a concentration camp into a death camp where inmates will be executed without due process or legal representation. Never before in history has a U.S. president contemplated the denaturalization of native-born citizens-thus far even people executed for treason have died as Americans--but Bush has drafted legislation that would allow him to strip anyone he calls an "enemy combatant" of their citizenship and have them deported. By any objective standard he has already gone way too far, but for many it would take the cancellation or delay of the elections to confirm that we are trading in our wounded democracy for a fascist state.

Make way for the king: Bush visits Senegal

President George Bush will wind up his five-nation Africa trip with a weekend visit to Nigeria, the hub of a West African oil boom fuelled by tens of billions of dollars in United States investment.

Here's a Senegalese woman's perspective on Bush's visit to Dakar.

Dearest friends, As you probably know, this week George Bush is visiting Africa. Starting with Senegal, he arrived this morning at 7.20 PM and left at 1.30 PM. This visit has been such an ordeal that a petition is being circulated for this Tuesday July 8th be named Dependency Day.
Let me share with you what we have been through since last week.
1- Arrestations : more than 1,500 persons have been arrested and put in jail between Thursday and Monday. Hopefully they will be released now that the Big Man is gone
2- The US Army's planes flying day and night over Dakar. The noise they make is so loud that one hardly sleeps at night
3- About 700 security people from the US for Bush's security in Senegal, with their dogs, and their cars. Senegalese security forces were not allowed to come near the US president
4- All trees in places where Bush will pass have been cut. Some of them have more than 100 years
5- All roads going down town (where hospitals, businesses, schools are located) were closed from Monday night to Tuesday at 3 PM. This means that we could not go to our offices or schools. Sick people were also obliged to stay at home.
6- National exams for high schools that started on Monday are postponed until Wednesday.
Bush's visit to the Goree Island is another story. As you may know Goree is a small Island facing Dakar where from the 15th to the 19th century, the African slaves to be shipped to America were parked in special houses called slave houses. One of these houses has become a Museum to remind humanity about this dark period and has been visited by kings, queens, presidents. Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and before them, Nelson Mandela, the Pope, and many other distinguished guests or ordinary tourists visited it without bothering the islanders. But for "security reasons" this time, the local population was chased out of their houses from 5 to 12 AM. They were forced by the American security to leave their houses and leaves everything open, including their wardrobes to be searched by special dogs brought from the US.
The ferry that links the island to Dakar was stopped and offices and businesses closed for the day.
According to an economist who was interviewed by a private radio, Senegal that is a very poor country has lost huge amount of money in this visit, because workers have been prevented from walking out of their homes.
In addition to us being prevented to go out, other humiliating things happened also. Not only Bush brought did not want to be with Senegalese but he did not want to use our things. He brought his own armchairs, and of course his own cars, and meals and drinks. He came with his own journalists and ours were forbidden inside the airport and in place he was visiting.
Our president was not allowed to make a speech. Only Bush spoke when he was in Goree. He spoke about slavery. It seems that he needs the vote of the African American to be elected in the next elections, and wanted to please them. That's why he visited Goree.
Several protest marches against American politics have been organized yesterday and even when Bush was here, but we think he does not care.
We have the feeling that everything has been done to convince us that we are nothing, and that America can behave the way it wants, everywhere, even in our country.
Believe me friends, it is a terrible feeling. But according to a Ugandan friend of mine, I should not complain because it Uganda one of the country he is going to visit, Bush does not intend to go out of the airport. He will receive the Ugandan President in the airport lounge.
Nevertheless, I think I am lucky, because I have such wonderful American friends. But there are now thousands of Senegalese who believe that for all Americans the world is their territory.

Love to you all, Codou

Bush says God told him to do it ... again

I believe God has called us into action. Our country has got a responsibility, we are a great nation, we are a wealthy nation, we have a responsibility to help a neighbour in need, a brother and sister in crisis.

CBS scrubs accusation that Bush knew

CBS changed a lead news story within hours from one accusing Bush of knowing the falsity of Iraqi nuclear claims to one pointing the finger at the CIA -- George Tennet is the fall guy.

Astronomers find oldest, most distant planet

Astronomers said the oldest and most distant planet yet found is a huge, gaseous sphere 13 billion years old and 5,600 light years away, a discovery that could change theories about when planets formed and when life could have evolved.
The planet, more than twice the size of Jupiter, orbits two stars, a pulsar and a white dwarf that linked together about a billion years ago. The system is in the constellation Scorpius within a globular cluster called M4 that contains stars that formed billions of years before the sun and its planets.

Iraq streets safe to walk again ... unless you're an Iraqi

Impassive American sentries point to a sign, scrawled in red felt-tip pen on a piece of cardboard hanging on the barbed wire, which says: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave."
Some, like Ghania Hassan, sink to their knees in despair. She holds a photograph of her eldest son, Mohammed Yasim Mohammed, a 22-year-old student. She said that he was walking through al-Shaab market
with friends when passing troops saw him eating biscuits from an American military ration pack and accused him of being a looter. Allegedly he was pushed face down on the street while his friends tried to explain how a soldier a couple of streets away had given them the biscuits.

Gigantic blob of flesh from the sea still a mystery

Is it a sea monster? A new species? Or maybe just the innards of a long dead whale?
Speculation has run wild over a vast blob of gray flesh found on a Chilean beach two weeks ago, and scientists from around the world have jumped to help identify it.
One expert is at least sure of what it is not a giant octopus. "It's not an octopus. I couldn't tell you what it is but it's not an octopus," Sergio Letelier, researcher at the Museum of Natural History in Santiago, said today.

JULY 15: Preliminary tests suggest it is the remains of a sperm whale.

Pluto atmosphere heating as it moves further from the sun

The planet/Kuiper Belt body Pluto seems to be defying the laws of atmospheric physics, according to studies published in the British weekly journal Nature.
The most distant planet of the Solar System follows an egg-shaped path with agonising slowness as it crawls around the Sun, each orbit taking the equivalent of 248 Earth years.
In 1989, evidence emerged that Pluto had a thin atmosphere as it swung by on its closest point to the Sun (perihelion).
Since then, the planet has been pulling away from the Sun, which means that, in theory, its surface temperature should be falling and its atmosphere should be contracting. Atmospheric pressure depends on heat, because gases expand when the temperature rises.
But astronomers in the United States and France say the opposite is happening: not only has the atmosphere failed to collapse as expected, its pressure seems to have doubled over the past 14 years

Another reason for the US to attack Iran?

Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said that in addition to Iran many countries, especially those in West Asia, are interested in conducting trade with Malaysia using the gold dinar for settlement.
"Arab countries, in particular, have expressed interest but the decision-making process and bureaucratic procedures take time," he said after opening the `International Convention on Gold Dinar as an Alternative International Currency' in Kuala Lumpur.
Dr Mahathir said efforts to use the gold dinar in bilateral trade with Iran had just started and, if successful, the same mechanism could be applied and expanded to Malaysia's other trading partners, particularly the 30-plus countries with which the country had concluded bilateral payment arrangements (BPA).

Government kidnaps citizen, nobody cares

The newspapers and television reported the following matter with no anger or effort to do anything other than serve as stenographers for the government.
More than four months ago, in Columbus, Ohio, the FBI arrested an American citizen they say is Iyman Faris. There wasn't a word uttered. He vanished.
No lawyer was notified. He made no phone calls and wrote no postcards or letters. He was a U.S. citizen who disappeared without a trace into a secret metal world.

Hunt for the God particle heats up

The Higgs boson -- so hard to find that it has been ironically dubbed "the God particle" -- is one of the greatest prizes in modern physics.
The confirmation or otherwise of the theoretical sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson -- is back up for grabs.
In a friendly but intense rivalry, European and US scientists have been going head-to-head to find the particle that will either confirm or wreck our concept of the physical universe.
The elusive particle (if it actually exists) was named after a Scottish physicist, Peter Higgs. He puzzled over the so-called Standard Model of physics, a century-old bestiary headed by the atom and which reaches down to progressively tinier and more exotically named sub-particles such as muons, quarks and stranges.