BIG BROTHER

How Spy Chips Are Quietly Reshaping Privacy

You may not realize it, but that pack of disposable razors you just bought can enable you to be tracked wherever you go. Same with that discount card you used to buy the razors in the first place.
Somewhere, a computer is collating and tabulating all of your information from the moment you step into the store, and using it to generate a "profile" of you for unknown purposes.
Not only that, but soon you could have a little microchip implanted in your body to be electronically "tagged" and identified in order to build a record of your medical information, accessible anywhere in the world -- and for other purposes you may not know about.

[Radio frequency identifiers (RFID chips) are a reality in everything from retail business to medical records.]

BIG BROTHER

Rumsfeld Spies on Quakers and Grannies

The Pentagon has a file on an anti-war group that was gathering at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida, to plan a counter-recruiting effort at local high schools.
That group of Quakers constitutes a “threat,” according to a 400-page Pentagon document.

ENDLESS WAR

The Other Army

Transporting firearms from the United States required legal documents that the company couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions. The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were operable.
So Triple Canopy had vehicles and it had assault rifles, and when it needed cash in Iraq, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago, the company's home, with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. ''All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,''' Mann said. ''Or, 'We need two backpacks.''' Each pack held half a million dollars.
And in this way, one of the largest private security companies in Iraq was born. In this way, Triple Canopy went off to war. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less.

EARTH CHANGES

Global warming 'past the point of no return'

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

Steve Connor: Vicious cycle will affect climate of northern hemisphere

Since the first satellites began monitoring the frozen ocean of the Arctic 27 years ago they have given us a bird's eye view of the relentless loss of the northern hemisphere's floating sea ice.
There is an annual cycle of sea ice growth and retreat each polar winter and summer, but the monthly averages collected since 1978 show an unambiguous, long-term decline. Satellite data shows the sea ice in September - the month when it melts to its minimum extent each year - has declined by about 8 per cent each decade.

[Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost about 20 per cent of its September sea ice.]

EARTH CHANGES

2005 hottest year ever in Australia

By the end of December 2005, it is expected to have been the second warmest year globally and there is no natural phenomenon like an El Nino effect to explain the heat.
At a conference in Sydney, experts will discuss the evidence.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Dr Michael Coughlan says there is no longer any debate about whether the world is getting warmer.
"Where the debate lies now is in the attribution issues and the general consensus of climate scientists is that there's a large component of human activities in that," he said.

[Catastrophic storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Stan took weather extremes across the globe to new levels in 2005, with flooding and heatwaves touching almost every continent, the United Nations Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says.]

NEWSPEAK

Euphemisms the rule. Plain english a casualty

Iraq's Fort Suse, the newest Theater Internment Facility capable of housing more than 1700 security detainees, recently began operations

[Theater Internment Facility = Jail. Security detainees = prisoners of war.]

BULLSHIT BAFFLES

Alibi Network helps people keep their secrets for a small fee

"We provide excuses.  For instance, doctor's call from the doctor's office, with the actual doctor's office on the caller ID.
If they choose to call to verify, we could make the number appear to be a doctor's office when it's actually going to our call center.
"Our main concern here is basically helping people get away with extramarital affairs, relationships.  We also help people with their image.  If they want to be pursued as somebody more important than they are, to impress somebody, we handle that.
"We provide phone numbers from anyplace in the world.  Again, the Caller I.D. will state whatever the client wants it to state, and we do it quite well.
"We believe here at Alibi Network, that if we're doing this, we are saving marriages.  The divorce rate -- even if the divorce rate could go just a percentage lower than it is, then our job was well done because of the fact that people are not finding out.  They move on with their life, and their family life remains the same, untouched."

[From the boardroom to the bedroom -- and including government mendacity -- lies, untruths and 'faulty intelligence' are now the widely accepted way of conducting human affairs.]

BAH HUMBUG

Christian soldiers battle the 'War on Christmas'

People now say 'we're celebrating the season,' or 'we're celebrating the holiday'," said Baptist Church pastor Corkish. "It's almost like people have been asked not to say, 'Merry Christmas.' I've been a pastor for 50 years and I've never seen anything like it."
Corkish joins an emerging chorus of religious conservatives and commentators who, bothered by what they see as a secular watering down of a Christian holiday, want to put the Christ back in Christmas. These groups contend that a fear of offending non-Christians has led retailers, schools and government agencies to ignore Christmas' biblical roots in favor of folk symbols like Santa Claus or generic phrases such as "Happy Holidays."

[There is a term for the supposed anti-Christmas bias: the War on Christmas, named for a new book by Fox News Channel anchor John Gibson, whose subtitle is, How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought.]

CLIMATE OF CHANGE

Changing the face of 'old' New York

Winter, the weather folk decree, begins on a particular date in late December and spring is due to blossom on 20 March.
But when I step outside our apartment onto Riverside Drive, with the Hudson rolling grandly past Manhattan's Upper Westside, it is hard to stand up, let alone advance in a freezing 30mph wind. And the second snowstorm of the week serves notice that the winter furies have ignored the script and arrived early.

EARTH CHANGES

Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said.

[The rate of the magnetic pole's movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries, the Oregon researchers said. At the present rate, the north magnetic pole could swing out of northern Canada into Siberia.]

MATH IS MURDER

Calls grow for withdrawal of Nobel prize

A group of Israeli intellectuals and activists has demanded that the Nobel prize committee withdraw the award for economics to be made today to an Israeli mathematician and his American colleague on the grounds that they are "warmongers".
The economics prize is to be presented to Robert Aumann of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Thomas Schelling of Maryland University in recognition of their "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis", a mathematical study of how individuals and governments react to other people's actions including in war.

RIGHTS TRASHED

ACLU: Protesters placed in terror files

The names and licenseplate numbers of about 30 people who protested three years ago in Colorado Springs were put into FBI domestic-terrorism files, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado said Thursday.
The Denver-based ACLU obtained federal documents on a 2002 Colorado Springs protest and a 2003 anti-war rally under the Freedom of Information Act.
ACLU legal director Mark Silverstein said “These documents confirm that the names and license plate numbers of several dozen peaceful protesters who committed no crime are now in a JTTF file marked ‘counterterrorism,’” he said.
“This kind of surveillance of First Amendment activities has serious consequences. Law-abiding Americans may be reluctant to speak out when doing so means that their names will wind up in an FBI file.”

[The FBI files are available here.]

ENDLESS WAR

Miami airplane shooting: Washington’s 'war on terrorism' comes home

The most chilling aspect of the brutal state killing of Rigoberto Alpizar, the 44-year-old Costa Rican immigrant gunned down while fleeing an American Airlines Boeing 757 in Miami Wednesday, is the utter absence of any statement of remorse by government officials.
Rather than publicly acknowledge that a horror and a tragedy had resulted from the use of lethal force against an unarmed and innocent man, spokesmen for the Bush administration and various state agencies praised those who killed him and virtually celebrated the spilling of blood on American soil in the so-called “global war on terrorism.”

Eyewitnesses refute official story

The central assertion that Alpizar posed a terrorist threat is based on the claim he said he had a bomb.
However, no witnesses -- including from among the more than 100 passengers and crew members on board the flight -- have come forward publicly to back up this allegation.
Instead, numerous passengers have directly contradicted it, even after hours of interrogation and prodding by police authorities in the wake of the shooting.

[The treatment of the plane’s passengers following the shooting was of a piece with the violence meted out to Alpizar. Armed federal marshals and police agents stormed the aircraft and ordered them to put their hands on their heads. Terrified passengers were told to remain motionless for more than an hour, and some reported having guns put to the backs of their heads.]

PAPER TRAIL

Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

[The Constitution isn't just a piece of paper or parchment. It's a contract; the original contract with America. It's the contract you yourself swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend against all enemies both foreign and domestic. You attached your name to that promise. You swore that oath before a judge of the United States Supreme Court, with your hand on a bible. That isn't just scenery for the cameras. Swearing an oath before a judge carries legal obligations with that oath, and legal penalties for breaking that oath.]

ASSEMBLY LINE

Nanotech discovery could have radical implications

Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another.
Instead of employing the traditional trial-and-error method of self-assembly that is used by nanotechnologists and which is found in nature, scientists propose starting with an exact blueprint of the nanostructure they want to build.

[The paper appearing in Physical Review Letters is a condensed version of a more detailed paper that has been accepted for publication in Physical Review E and which will probably appear sometime before the end of the year.]

COACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Brothers die in crashes just minutes apart

Two brothers died within minutes of each other in separate traffic crashes in a rural county where their father is a sheriff's deputy.
Rory McDowell, 23, and Cory McDowell, 21, were pronounced dead a couple of miles and 20 minutes apart.

Father, Andy McDowell, was not on duty at the time but was taken to Rory's crash. He later was driven past Cory's fiery crash, not knowing his younger son was involved in it.

["You take the most unimaginable hell that a parent could be told and double that," Warren County Deputy Coroner Dwayne Lawrence said.]

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

Quantum Entanglement Between Remote Ensembles of Atoms Achieved

Reporting in the December 8 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology physicist H. Jeff Kimble and his colleagues announce the first realization of entanglement for one "spin excitation" stored jointly between two samples of atoms. In the Caltech experiment, the atomic ensembles are located in a pair of apparatuses 2.8 meters apart, with each ensemble composed of about 100,000 individual atoms.
According to Kimble, who is the Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech, this research significantly extends laboratory capabilities for entanglement generation, with now-entangled "quantum bits" of matter stored with separation several thousand times greater than was heretofore possible.

[In the Caltech experiment, the entanglement involves "collective atomic spin excitations." To generate such excitations, an ensemble of cold atoms initially all in level "a" of two possible ground levels is addressed with a suitable "writing" laser pulse. For weak excitation with the write laser, one atom in the sample is sometimes transferred to ground level "b," thereby emitting a photon.]

POWER AND PASSION

Bush and Blair slated by Pinter

Most politicians "are interested not in truth but in power and the maintenance of that power", the 75-year-old writer Harold Pinter said in his lecture as winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
His lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, studied the importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in politics.
He said politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives".
"You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."

[Pinter, whose plays include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, was announced the winner of the $1.3m (£740,000) cash prize in October.]

EARTH CHANGES

Greenland glacier races to ocean

Scientists have been monitoring what they say may be the fastest moving glacier on the planet.
Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier on the east coast of Greenland has been clocked using GPS equipment and satellites to be flowing at a rate of 14km per year.
It is also losing mass extremely fast, with its front end retreating 5km back up its fjord this year alone.
The glacier "drains" about 4 per cent of the ice sheet, dumping tens of cubic kilometres of fresh water in the North Atlantic.
This gives it significant influence not just on global sea level rise but on the system of ocean circulation which drives through the Arctic.

[]

SEDITION BITES

Australian bloggers muzzled

Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.
Many local bloggers are unaware that they may be liable for everything they write on their sites, not to mention all of the colourful comments made by contributors.
Our new sedition laws will make this worse.
Blogs fall under the same defamation and other laws that regulate all media organisations in the country.
While US bloggers are protected by a freedom of speech clause in the US Bill of Rights, new sedition laws passed by Australian authorities may make life even tougher for bloggers.

[Hey evil pundit, don't complain when a Labor Government locks you up because it doesn't like the way you look at them.]

WATER WARS

Choking on Chemicals in China

Most of the country's air and waterways are hopelessly polluted and the government has done little to address the problem. Instead, officials prefer to lie.

In the northeast Chinese city of Harbin, hundreds of people wait for a water truck. They have been waiting in the bitter cold since early morning -- though the water delivery isn't scheduled until 11 am.
"We are now frugal with water," says a woman in a red woolen cap. "First we use it to clean vegetables, then to wash our hands and finally to flush the toilet."
The emergency came about when 100 tons of toxic chemicals from Chemical Factory 101 floated down the Songhua River afer an explosion 400 kilometers upstream which released highly toxic benzene compounds.

[The slick, slowly traveling down river toward Russia, threatens the drinking water supply for more than 10 million people between the northeast Chinese city of Harbin and Khabarovsk in Siberia.]

POWER POINT

Bullet Points over Baghdad

The National Security Council document released under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.
Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.
The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media.
And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

[NY Times original]

PROJECT PAPERCLIP

Dark side of the Moon

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.

[Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.]

SONIC WEAPON

Armed pirates approach the Seabourn Spirit, in a photo taken by British passenger Norman Fisher.


Pirates shoot at Britons' cruise liner

Terrified Britons came under fire from machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades yesterday when pirates tried to hijack one of the world's most luxurious cruise liners.
Holidaymakers on the Seabourn Spirit watched in disbelief as the armed bandits blew a hole in the side of the vast ship and hit a passenger cabin during their failed attempt to board.
The ship was carrying 161 crew members and 151 passengers who had paid up to £6,000 each to enjoy the 16-day cruise in the height of luxury.

[The ship's crew triggered a sonic weapon, which sent out ear-splitting bangs to repel the pirates. The Spirit escaped with minor damage and slight injuries to one crew member caused by shrapnel. The sonic device, known as a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, is a so-called "non-lethal weapon" developed for the military after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.]

FLAWED LOGIC

Bush visits China

A reporter asks why he seemed so subdued earlier at his appearance with Mr Hu. The reporter suggests he was "off his game".
"Have you ever heard of jet lag?" Mr Bush fires back. He then ends the meeting by striding purposefully away towards a door - which turns out to be locked. An aide shepherds him out.

A freer economy will yield a freer political system

This is one of the president's core beliefs, in plain view on this trip: when a state liberalises its economy, political liberalisation will inevitably follow.
This belief obviates the need to confront the Chinese leadership. Economic liberalisation is underway in China. Ergo, political liberalisation is only a matter of time. The die is cast.

[How does it follow that opening up the economy frees up the political environment?]

MONEY PIT

For sale: Oak Islands buried mystery

Oak Island, in Nova Scotia, is famous for its Money Pit, a mystery that has endured two centuries, claimed six lives and swallowed up millions in life savings.
The Pit was discovered in 1795 by a local boy named Daniel McGinnis who, spotting an unusual clearing in the earth under one of the island's oak trees, was prompted to start digging. The discovery of layered planks, mysterious stone slabs, and mats made of coconut fibers descending deep into the ground turned his casual afternoon dig into an all-out excavation.
What appears to be a complex flooding trap has thwarted efforts to reach the bottom of the Money Pit ever since. Some think the pit was purposely flooded with seawater, via a series of artificial swamps and tunnels, to hide its contents.
Through the murk, drill borings and shafts dug by the island's series of owners have detected what seem to be cement vaulting, wooden chests, and scraps of parchment paper. Radiocarbon dating of these artifacts is consistent: whoever constructed the shaft likely did so sometime in the 16th Century.

[Oak Island's current owners, Dan Blankenship and David Tobias, have worked on the island since the 1960s, sinking millions of dollars into the project and revealing some intriguing clues of their own. For many who follow Oak Island developments, their abandonment of the treasure comes as a surprise. As recently as December of 2003, Blankenship told the Halifax Herald that he would announce some new, exciting findings in the following months. The revelation never came.]

FUEL'S PARADISE?

Power source that turns physics on its head

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel.
Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments.
The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics the idea is theoretically impossible.
What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron.
In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.
According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

["Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.]

AETHER UPDATE

Einstein's wrong, relatively speaking

In 2002, Australian Professor Reg Cahill started to question what he thought were anomalies in Einstein's theory that time and space are relative.
"They all agreed with one another and they were all indicating a huge speed difference in different directions," he said. "When you find out the speed of light differs, the whole Einstein theory starts collapsing."
Professor Cahill said that debunking the Einstein theories would lead to new discoveries in physics and greater understanding of phenomena that could not yet be fully explained.
"There are some incredible discoveries being made," he said. "We're discovering some properties about space that are awesome."
Those discoveries include the speed at which the solar system is travelling through space and the detection of gravitational waves.
Support for Professor Cahill is growing. The Australian Research Council gave a $60,000 grant for his research, and the world's largest particle physics laboratory - CERN in Switzerland - has donated $100,000 worth of optical fibres.

[Physicist Paul Davies of Macquarie University and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology said Einstein's theories of relativity had been tested, and there was no evidence to suggest they were wrong.]

MAGNETIC EARTH

New clues to make magnets more powerful

Using the Western Hemisphere's most powerful X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, researchers were able to see new details of rare-earth ions, a critical component of permanent magnets.
The research found that rare-earth ions in dissimilar crystalline environments compete with one another, and undermine the magnetic performance of the highest performance magnets, said Argonne scientist Daniel Haskel, who led the research team.
These findings point to the need for specialized atomic engineering of the material -- manipulating the rare-earth local atomic structure to fully utilize the rare-earth contribution in next generations of magnets.

[The findings are published in Physical Review Letter]

FREE SPEECH

Airports at vanguard of dissent-crushing

Dawn Hansen arrived at the checkpoint at Oakland International Airport wearing a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled "Daddy's Little War Criminal".

"When I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, 'Come over here!' No 'Please,' no ID check. Then she said, 'Give me your jacket!' They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn't set it off either time. Then this second woman said, 'You go sit down over there!' They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs.
"They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, 'Why are you traveling with so much reading material?'"
Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward's latest book. "I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. ... They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I'd been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case.
"When I got home I found out they'd taken the lids off all my creams and just left them like that so they got all over everything."

[Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft]

PRIME TARGET

Red carpet for warmonger

US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the main architects of the war on Iraq, is coming to Adelaide. With the blood of as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians on his hands, this supposed champion of democracy will be meeting with similar Australian champions behind massive police protection.

Adelaide to be locked down for Rumsfeld visit

Sections of Adelaide will be virtually locked down as part of a massive security operation to protect U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later this month.
The two-day visit will result in areas around the Hyatt Hotel and the Town Hall declared no-go zones amid fears of ugly anti-Iraq war protests. It is likely sections of North Tce and King William St will be fenced off to keep the thousands of expected protesters away from both sites.
Although there is no intelligence to suggest a threat, SA police are well aware Mr Rumsfeld is one of the world's top terrorist targets.

[Mr Rumsfeld, deputy U.S. Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and a senior U.S. army general are visiting Adelaide for Ausmin - the Australia-United States Ministerial Meeting - on November 17 and 18.]

ICEMAN COMETH

Death renews iceman 'curse' claim

The death of a molecular biologist has fuelled renewed speculation about a "curse" connected to an ancient corpse.
Tom Loy, 63, had analysed DNA found on "Oetzi", the Stone Age hunter whose remains were discovered in 1991.
Dr Loy died in unclear circumstances in Australia two weeks ago, it has been announced, making him the seventh person connected with Oetzi to die.

[Over the past few years many microbiologists have died in mysterious circumstances.]

SILVER SPOONS

Silver kills viruses, superbugs, study shows

In a groundbreaking study, the Journal of Nanotechnology has published a study that found silver nanoparticles kills HIV-1 and is likely to kill virtually any other virus. The study, which was conducted by the University of Texas and Mexico University, is the first medical study to ever explore the benefits of silver nanoparticles, according to Physorg.
While further research is needed, researchers are optimistic that nanological silver may be the silver bullet to kill viruses. The researchers in the study said that they had already begin experiments using silver nanoparticles to kill what is known as the super bug (Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus). Already used as a topical antibiotic in the medical industry, silver may now come under consideration as an alternative to drugs when it comes to fighting previously untreatable viruses such as the Tamiflu resistant avian flu.

DOUBLE PLUS UNGOOD

Another soldier's blog shut down

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia

... it breaks my heart to say that this will be my last post on this blog. I wish I could just stop there, but I can not. The following also needs to be said:
For the record, I am officially a supporter of the administration and of her policies. I am a proponent for the war against terror and I believe in the mission in Iraq. I understand my role in that mission, and I accept it. I understand that I signed the contract which makes stop loss legal, and I retract any statements I made in the past that contradict this one.
Furthermore, I have the utmost confidence in the leadership of my chain of command, including (but not limited to) the president George Bush and the honorable secretary of defense Rumsfeld.
If I have ever written anything on this site or on others that lead the reader to believe otherwise, please consider this a full and complete retraction.

[On this day, may you not be napalmed by an invading Army. May you not be tortured for a parking violation. Today, may your hometown not be bombed. When you sit down to eat tonight, may armed men not barge into your house and search your wife’s underwear drawer. May you not be zip-tied, marched outside, beaten and shot in the face.]

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Quantum dot mixture takes LED lighting to a new level

Quantum dots -- crystals generally only a few nanometers big -- contain anywhere from 100 to 1000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.
When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.
"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."

[How about light-emitting paints or materials? Alleged alien abductees often describe rooms that are filled with light even though there is no discernible light source.]

BIG BROTHER

Close up of actual tracking dots, taken through a microscope

Is Your Printer Spying On You?

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?
Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information.
The FBI has amassed thousands of pages from non-violent groups including Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice.
In the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters.

[There are no laws to prevent abuse of this feature.]

DOUBLE STANDARD

Psy-Ops agents at work - Taliban taunted over desecrated bodies

American soldiers in Afghanistan desecrated the bodies of Taliban fighters by burning them in violation of Islamic tradition and then taunted a nearby village about the act, an Australian television network has reported.
The SBS television network broadcast video footage on its respected Dateline current affairs program late Wednesday purportedly showing U.S. soldiers burning the bodies of two suspected Taliban fighters in the hills outside the southern village of Gonbaz, near the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

["Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be," said one message, read out by a soldier identified by SBS as Sgt. Jim Baker.]

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Police, military may have one of 2002 Bali bombs

INDONESIAN police or military officers may have played a role in the 2002 Bali bombing, the country's former president, Abdurrahman Wahid has said.
In an interview with SBS's Dateline program to be aired tonight, on the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 202 people, Mr Wahid says he has grave concerns about links between Indonesian authorities and terrorist groups.
While he believed terrorists were involved in planting one of the Kuta night club bombs, the second, which destroyed Bali's Sari Club, had been organised by authorities.
Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe the police ... or the armed forces."

Flashback Claims military involved in Jakarta blast
(ABC Radio Australia News :: (August 8, 2003)

An advisor to the Indonesian government claims the armed forces may have been involved in the recent car bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. A car bomb killed at least 10 people and injured scores more at the luxury hotel.
The advisor, Jawanda, has told our South East Asia correspondent Peter Lloyd that attempts to blame Muslim extremists for the suicide bombing may be premature.

GRAVITY UNWELL

International Space Station orbit correction fails

An attempt by scientists to raise the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) by 10 kilometres failed on Wednesday, Russian space officials said.
A number of the engines of the Progress M-54 cargo ship, which was supposed to lift the ISS, shut down shortly after the start of the manoeuvre, an official at Russia's mission control centre was quoted by the RIA-Novosti news agency as saying.
"At roughly the 170th second of the operation, several engines shut down by themselves... the orbit correction was suspended and experts are now examining the reasons," the official said.

China's spacecraft orbit 'slips' (14 October 2005)

China's Shenzhou VI spacecraft is not orbiting exactly as planned and will have to be restored to its original trajectory, state-run media say.
The "orbit maintenance operation" would take place early on Friday morning, said official news agency Xinhua.
Shenzhou VI, has two astronauts on board, and is China's longest manned space flight.
Xinhua quoted experts as saying the procedure to fix the craft's orbit would be a "normal technical operation".
Nonetheless, the agency said, experts were urging all scientific and technological staff to be "cautious".
The craft had deviated from its planned trajectory because of resistance from the Earth's atmosphere.
The adjustment, which was carried out by firing the craft's thrusters, altered the spacecraft's altitude by 800m, the People's Daily said.

[Separately, an official with Russia's Roskosmos space agency said scientists had lost control of Russia's new earth-monitoring satellite, the Monitor-E, intended for research purposes including mapping and monitoring pollution.]

GOING TO POT

Good news for marijuana smokers

Yet a new study has found the opposite: that one of marijuana’s active ingredients actually helps produce new brain cells, while apparently reducing anxiety.
It’s part of a double whammy of good news for pot lovers, as another study has found that marijuana smoke is less carcinogenic than cigarette smoke.
None of this establishes that pot smoking is safe. Some past studies have found it produces notable memory impairments, although there is debate over how long these last.
Nonetheless, the new findings contain “good news for the medical marijuana movement,” chirped a press release from the Journal of Clinical Investigation, which is publishing the study on new brain cells.

[In the experiment new cells grew in the hippocampus, a brain area associated with emotional expression and some aspects of memory formation.]

POLICE STATE

Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo,
Secret Service Investigates

Selina Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head.
Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called policewho turned the matter over to the Secret Service.
The student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster.
“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student."
They told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.

[Dissent is now unchristian. Dissent is now undemocratic. Dissent is now un-American. Dissent is now dangerous.]

MARTIAL LAW

Bush: Military may have to help if bird flu breaks out

President Bush says the possibility of an avian flu pandemic is among the reasons he wants Congress to give him the power to use the nation's military in law enforcement roles in the United States.
"I'm concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world," he told reporters during a Rose Garden news conference on Tuesday.
Such an event would raise difficult questions, such as how a quarantine might be enforced, he said.

[The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bans the military from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil.
CNN reported Bush began discussing the possibility of changing the law last month, in the aftermath of the government's sluggish response to civil unrest following Hurricane Katrina. However many of the tales of civil unrest at evacuation sites appear to be rumors]

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

American Army chaplain ends up in Guantanamo

I witnessed my first IRFing (Initial Response Forced cell extraction) after a military policeman had performed the "credit card swipe" - pressing his fingers inside a detainee's buttock crack to look for a weapon.
This type of physical contact is not acceptable under Islamic law and the detainee had pushed the guard away.
But prisoners were not allowed to touch an MP and immediately eight guards were summoned.
They put on riot protection gear - helmets, heavy gloves, shin guards and chest protectors - before forming a huddle and chanting in unison, getting themselves pumped up.
Still chanting, they rushed the block, their heavy boots sounding like a stampede on the steel floor. Detainees throughout Camp Delta started to yell and shake their cage doors.
When the IRF team reached the offending detainee, the team leader drenched him with pepper spray and opened the door to his cell. The others charged in. He was no match for eight men in riot gear.
The guards used their shields and bodies to force him to the floor. With his wrists and ankles tied, he was dragged down the corridor to solitary confinement.
When it was over the guards high-fived each other and slammed their chests together like professional basketball players - an odd victory celebration for eight men who took down one prisoner.

DUMBING DOWN

Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash

"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class...

The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focussed essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work--which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.

[At this university, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.]

VISUAL THEATRE

"It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell," reads the ad, which ran this week in the National Journal and earlier in the Armed Forces Journal. The ad also stated: "Consider it a gift from above."

Boeing-Bell Hellicopter advert 'should not have been published

Boeing and its joint-venture partner Bell Helicopter apologized yesterday for a magazine ad published a month ago — and again this week by mistake — depicting U.S. Special Forces troops rappelling from an Osprey aircraft onto the roof of a mosque.

[Officials for Boeing and Bell Helicopter said this magazine ad for the Osprey aircraft should never have been published.]

PSYCHOPATHS RULE

Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

MINISTRY OF PEACE

State Premiers agree to 'draconian' terror laws

Suspected terrorists as young as 16 will face house arrest for up to a year without being convicted of an offence under sweeping laws agreed to by all Australian governments.
Police will also be able to pre-emptively detain people for up to 14 days, without charge, if they suspect they are planning a terrorist offence.
State premiers and chief ministers met the Prime Minister yesterday and accepted the harsh new laws, which Queensland's Peter Beattie called draconian but necessary.
Suspects placed under house arrest would have no warning of the action until issued orders by federal police. The court orders would be issued in secret.
Meeting Mr Howard in Canberra, the political leaders were reassured by the judicial checks and balances, although the new laws left lawyers aghast.
Mr Howard needed the states to agree because the Federal Government does not have the constitutional power on its own to bring in some of the changes.
At the heart of the legislative changes are the tough preventive detention rules and "control orders" - restrictions such as house arrest, electronic tagging and tracking, and bans on approaching certain areas or people.

[The US, British and Australian governments are passing laws that, paradoxically, are slowly removing the liberties that American, British and Australian governments claim to be protecting by passing with the laws!
The argument is that they are protecting our freedom to not be blown up, so any measure allowable.]

GOOGLE BOX

Google and the government

Terms of use documents show Google is ready, willing and able to show the information they collect about you to any Government official in any country they choose.
Google offers more storage for your email than other Internet service providers that we know about. The powerful searching encourages account holders to never delete anything. It takes three clicks to put a message into the trash, and more effort to delete this message. It's much easier to "archive" the message, or just leave it in the inbox and let the powerful searching keep track of it.
Google admits that even deleted messages will remain on their system, and may also be accessible internally at Google, for an indefinite period of time. For a few months they showed a note saying that messages left in the trash folder for 30 days would be automatically deleted, but many users reported that this never happened. Now that message, which is still present for the spam folder, is gone from the trash folder. Google wants very much to get to know you better.

[Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil".]

THE WEATHERMEN

Michael Chertoff and Bush
US Northern Command and Hurricane Rita

There are indications that the Bush Administration is preparing to enact far-reaching emergency procedures in response to Hurricane Rita, which could potentially lead the country into a situation of Martial Law. 
Following his visit to Texas on September 23,  President Bush traveled together with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to The Peterson Air Force Base, at the headquarters of US Northern Command in Colorado Springs.
He spent the night of September 23 at Colorado Springs and was at US NorthCom headquarters on the morning of the 24th of September, when Hurricane Rita hit the Texas-Louisiana coastline.

At the same time. Radar imagery captured the following image. Noting the red bars on the left.



[From one comment on CyberspaceOrbit:
Whatever those 5 spots are, they definitely are not an artifact and they are the cause of rita turning north a few miles ahead of schedule. they seem to be directed from corpus christi. my presumption is that they are ships. we have high powered microwave weapons , ship mounted, in the 90-110 GHZ range which overlaps the radar freq. used in the animation. i worked on the first ones in 1983. contract was NSG through DOD. they heat a thin surface layer of any watery target (like raindrops-though that wasnt the original intent) they are aiming UP toward top of rita. you found a definite "something".]

BLACK AND WHITE

SKY IS FALLING

'Fireball' lights up Florida night sky

ates said one caller who was walking his dog near the Sebastian Inlet described the object as "huge, like a giant fireball."
The caller said he looked toward the Atlantic Ocean and saw the object disappear into the sea.

[Bart Lipofsky, a professor of physics and astronomy at Brevard Community College, said it more than likely sailed over the horizon instead of splashing down.]

APOCALYPTIC PANDEMIC

Indonesian Capital May Be Facing a Bird Flu Epidemic (Update1)

Indonesia's capital Jakarta and its surrounding areas may be facing a bird flu epidemic after at least four people died from the disease, Agriculture Minister Anton Apriantono said.
The government plans to spend 134 billion rupiah ($13 million) this year to cull poultry in the affected areas, Apriantono said in a phone interview in Jakarta.
"It may be right that it is an epidemic in Jakarta and Tangerang,'' which is 25 kilometers (16 miles) west of the capital, Apriantono said. "So that's why we are concentrating on our efforts in Jakarta and Tangerang.''
More than 140 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia because of concern that H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans.
As humans are unlikely to have immunity to a mutated strain of H5N1, the World Health Organization is concerned it may trigger an influenza pandemic like the one that led to more than 40 million deaths worldwide in 1918. All cases of human infection in Asia are believed by health officials to have come from animals.

GIT MO' BLUES

Hunger strikers pledge to die in Guantánamo

More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike, the Guardian has been told.
Statements from prisoners in the camp which were declassified by the US government on Wednesday reveal that the men are starving themselves in protest at the conditions in the camp and at their alleged maltreatment.
The statements show that prisoners are determined to starve themselves to death.
In one, Binyam Mohammed, a former London schoolboy, said: "I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected.

BBC:

Dozens of detainees have joined a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, bringing the number refusing food to 128, US officials say.
Eighteen prisoners have been hospitalised, including 13 who are being tube-fed.
Lawyers for the detainees say they are demanding release or immediate trial.
This is the latest in a series of hunger strikes since 2002 by detainees, who are held at the facility on Cuba as part of the US war on terror.
Lawyers for the detainees said as many as 200 were involved in the protest.
Many of the inmates have been held without charge for more than three years. A hunger strike in July ended when the Pentagon agreed to talk to inmates.
The prison at Guantanamo holds about 500 prisoners from nearly 40 countries.

CNN:
Eighteen prisoners are in medical facilities forcibly receiving nutrition intravenously or through nasal tubes, Pentagon officials said.

[The prisoners follow in the long tradition of hunger-strikers from Gandhi to Bobby Sands. Their demands are simple. They want the ability to challenge the terms of their imprisonment in court.]

EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

Scottish MP George Galloway on Hurricane Katrina aftermath:

"The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on Earth. This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the U.S. elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans.
"The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the US Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.
"In the most terrible way imaginable they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens - the black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter.
"This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House's incompetence abounds. It is murder - for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq."

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Zarqawi fuels his ambition with the release of a video of the beheading of Nick Berg.

How US fuelled myth of Zarqawi the mastermind

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the abduction of Kenneth Bigley, is 'more myth than man', according to American military intelligence agents in Iraq.
Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the most spectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence and the Bush administration's desire to find "a villain" for the post-invasion mayhem.
US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".

MARTIAL LAW

US media hails martial law general in New Orleans

In search of reassurance, the media has latched onto an unlikely hero—the US Army general who is overseeing what amounts to martial law in New Orleans, directing thousands of heavily armed troops in this largely deserted American city littered with floating corpses.
The media is systematically promoting Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. He is portrayed as the antidote to the miserable incompetence and negligence exhibited by every level of government in the first four days following the hurricane, when the poor, the elderly, the sick and infant children were left literally to die in the streets without aid.

[Military takeovers of government are welcomed, initially. The military is seen as "able to get things done" and as less susceptible to corruption than the civilian government.  Was the incompetence by FEMA deliberate?]

PRESCIENCE, PLANNING?

Story describes New Orleans devastation ... before Katrina hits

As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
...
Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse.
As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

[Article written prior to Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans in September 2005.]

DEAR LEADER

The Associated Press reports Bush's next speech will be held in historic Jackson Square, New Orleans, with the famous St. Louis Cathedral as a backdrop -- and he won't risk having anyone around who might disagree with him or ask an impertinent question.
In fact, the AP says, there won't be a live audience at all. (Journalists covering the event won't be allowed to stray from their press vans.)
As for the speech itself, it will inevitably seek to answer any naysaying about Bush by recasting him in the heroic, leadership role he played after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- while advocating a range of measures that are dear to the conservative political agenda.

POWER TRIP

Bush says he may need more power in disasters

President Bush on Monday urged Congress to examine whether the White House needs stronger powers to deal with catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.
Bush’s backing for the congressional inquiry raised the possibility that lawmakers might expand presidential authority to:
• Order mandatory civilian evacuations
• Dispatch U.S.-based armed forces for emergency search-and-rescue operations
• Grant wider leeway for active-duty U.S. military personnel to carry out law enforcement operations.

MARTIAL LAW

FEMA Deliberately Sabotaging Hurricane Relief Efforts

Numerous credible sources have come forward with examples of how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is deliberately sabotaging Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in New Orleans.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard (pictured above) appeared on Meet the Press Sunday and broke down in tears as he described FEMA's criminal activities.
We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word.
"FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines."
Why would FEMA, an organization supposedly tasked with helping in a time of crisis, deliberately cut police communication lines? This is a blatant example of sabotage and a sick push to make the disaster worse.

FEMA's Katrina body count job to firm implicated in body-dumping

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.
Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.
Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco subsequently inked a contract with the firm after talks between FEMA and the firm broke down. Kenyon's original deal was secured by the Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, FEMA and then Blanco outsourced the body count from Hurricane Katrina to a firm whose parent company is known for its "experience" at hiding and dumping bodies.
Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), expressed concern over FEMA's choice of an SCI subsidiary and questioned whether the selection was made through a no-bid process.

CROSS PURPOSES

Investigation finds Red Cross agreed to withhold Orleans aid, operates in tandem with Homeland Security

Information surrounding relief efforts by the American Red Cross in New Orleans raises questions about whether the organization provided adequate relief and whether funds are actually being directed to Katrina victims.
Previous investigations have shown that the Red Cross mishandled its 9/11 fund, attempting to divert more than half into a "war fund" before Congress intervened, and moved $10 million from a fund in 1989 for earthquake victims towards other uses.
Allegations of similar holdbacks following the Oklahoma City bombing and several later disasters, coupled with the discovery that the Red Cross, mandated by its Code of Conduct to remain independent of government, is officially part of the Bush Administration's national security apparatus.

SKY IS FALLING

Man in 'meteor' sighting over town

Steve Powell, 49, saw what he believes was a huge meteor last night at around 11.45pm. He described the object as a big orange ball, about the size of a full moon which he believed was a meteor crashing to earth.

BIOTERROR ALERT

Mice with plague vanish at top-level lab

Three lab mice carrying deadly strains of plague have disappeared from separate cages at a bio-terror research facility in Newark, sparking a hushed, intensive investigation by federal and state authorities. Officials said the animals could have been stolen from the center or simply misplaced in a colossal accounting error at one of the top-level bio-containment labs in New Jersey.
The incident occurred more than two weeks ago and was confirmed only Wednesday after questions were raised by The Star-Ledger newspaper.
The lab is run by the Public Health Research Institute, a leading center for research on infectious diseases, now participating in a six-year federal bio-defense project to find new vaccinations for the plague - which federal officials fear could be used as a bio-weapon.

PANDEMIC

US buys $100 million of bird flu vaccine

Mass production of a new vaccine that promises to protect against bird flu is poised to begin, as the US government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of inoculations.
The new contract with French vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur marks a major scale-up in U.S. preparation for the possibility that the worrisome virus could spark an influenza pandemic.

ASTEROID MISSION

Japanese probe pulls alongside asteroid

Bringing Japan's most complex space mission near its climax, a probe is within 12 miles of an asteroid almost 180 million miles from Earth in an unprecedented rendezvous designed to retrieve rocks from its surface.
The Hayabusa probe, launched in May 2003, will hover around the asteroid for about three months before making its brief landing to recover the samples in early November. The asteroid is located between Earth and Mars.

TIPPING POINT

Global warming 'past the point of no return

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover.
Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.
"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.

Retreating glaciers worrying Greenlanders

The gargantuan chunks of ice breaking off the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier and thundering into an Arctic fjord make a spectacular sight. But to Greenlanders it is also deeply worrisome.
The frequency and size of the icefalls are a powerful reminder that the frozen sheet covering the world's largest island is thinning - a glaring sign of global warming, scientists say.
"We now have bream in our river, which we didn't have in the past because that fish is typical of warmer regions," said one. "On the one hand it may look like good news, but bream are predatory fish that prey upon fish eggs, often of rare kinds of fish."
Research also shows that populations of turbot, Atlantic cod and snow crab are no longer found in some parts of the Bering Sea, an important fishing zone between Alaska and Russia

CORPORATE LAW

Forget Martial Law. What about Corporte Law?

Already, the usual forces of corporate restructuring are lining up. Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has begun work on a $500 million US Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Blackwell Security - the folks that brought you Abu Ghraib - are patrolling the streets of our city.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the rich white elite is already planning their vision of New Orleans' reconstruction, from the super-rich gated compounds of Audubon Place Uptown, where they have set up a heliport and brought in a heavily-armed Israeli security company. "The new city must be something very different, one of these city leaders was quoted as saying, "with better services and fewer poor people. Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically"

BUSH GOES POTTY

Websites being hacked? No, it's just Bush getting weirder

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. (REUTERS/Rick Wilking).
The note reads: "I think I MAY NEED A BATHroom break? Is this possible? ..."

[How many other world leaders would need two conditional declarations within the first four words about something so definitive, still need a question mark at the end of the sentence, and then have to ask again?]

DARK STAR

Sun may have binary partner which affects the Earth

The movement of the solar system known as the precession of the equinox occurs because the Sun has a companion star; both stars orbit a common center of gravity.
The grand cycle–the time it takes to complete one orbit––is called a "Great Year," a term coined by Plato.

[When it passes through the Oort Belt, it dislodges comets and other bodies, sending them sunward (ie towards us.]

WEATHER NERDS

Blogger warns New Orleans 3 days before hurricane

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.
"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."
Loy's posting that Friday afternoon came three days before the hurricane struck and two days before the mayor of New Orleans, Ray C. Nagin, issued an evacuation order.

WINDS OF CHANGE

Hurricane Katrina's aftermath: from natural disaster to national humiliation

The presidency, the Congress and both the Republican and Democratic parties - all have displayed an astounding lack of concern for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been shattered and who face the most daunting and uncertain future, not to mention the tens of millions more who will be hard hit by the economic aftershocks of Katrina.
In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the incompetence, stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that characterize so much of America's money-mad corporate elite find their quintessentially repulsive expression.
It is now clear that his administration made no serious preparations to deal with the dangers posed by the approaching storm.
On the "Good Morning America" television program, Bush reprised his miserable performance of the previous day, adding to earlier banalities the declaration that there would be "zero tolerance" for looters.

GIT MO' BLUES

Guantanamo hunger strike

Scores of detainees are on hunger strike at the Guantanamo US 'war on terror' detention camp, lawyers for the detainees and US military authorities said today.
Lawyers for the inmates said at least 210 men had been on hunger strike for the last three weeks.
Military officials at Guantanamo said there were 76.
Detainee advocates have blamed brutal treatment from guards, including beatings and abuse.
"Since January 2002, the (Defense Department) has denied prisoners access to the courts or legal counsel in an effort to avoid justifying the basis for the detentions. This policy has driven detainees to strike until they die or are afforded a fair hearing and humane treatment," said attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing some of the prisoners.
There are about 505 detainees at the detention camp on the US naval base in Cuba, including Australian David Hicks.

HORSE HAS BOLTONED

US wants to renegotiate draft UN reform agreement: report

A total of 750 UN amendments have been presented to selected envoys by the new US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.
In them, the US government proposes to eliminate new pledges on foreign aid to poor nations, scrap provisions calling for action to halt climate change and urging greater progress by nuclear powers in dismantling their nuclear arms.
...
The US amendments call for striking any mention of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, in which UN members set goals over the next 15 years to reduce poverty, preventable diseases and other scourges of the world's poor.
In their stead, the US wants to underscore the importance of the 2002 Monterrey (Mexico) Consensus, that focused on free-market reforms and required governments to improve accountability in exchange for aid and debt relief, the Post said.
The proposals also underscore US efforts to impose greater oversight of UN spending and to eliminate any reference to the International Criminal Court.

MATESHIP OF STATE

Parliamentary guards told 'no more Mr Nice Guy'

Security staff at Parliament House in Canberra have been directed not to use the word 'mate' when addressing people in the building.
The Department of Parliamentary Services has confirmed a daily brief directed security staff to treat all visitors with courtesy and not to use the term 'mate' or similar colloquialisms.

CLEARWATER, FLORIDA

Divers In Gulf report `zero things' Alive

Diver Mike Miller struggles to convey the horror he has seen on the ocean floor. He struggles because there are only so many ways you can say dead.
``I'm talking zero things are alive out there,'' Miller said. ``The only way to describe it is a nuclear bomb.''
Miller and other alarmed divers say they have documented a dead zone 20 miles offshore in the Gulf waters from Johns Pass to Clearwater. This information, combined with an unprecedented number of dead turtles washing up on Pinellas County beaches this week, has divers, fishermen and scientists worried that red tide is killing more efficiently.
``Normally when we get a red tide, you can go a little north or a little west or south or someplace else and dive,'' said Ben Dautermen, who takes divers out of Clearwater on his charter boat. ``Usually it doesn't kill every single thing.''
Red tide, an algae toxic to fish and an irritant to humans who breathe its choking vapors, has hung stubbornly to Florida's west coast for close to three months. Miller and other longtime locals who make their living in the Gulf say it's the worst outbreak in their experience.

SIBERIA HEATING

Warming hits 'tipping point'

It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting.

ANIMAL INSTINCT

A bizarre freeway of fish swimming by the thousands along a US shoreline Thursday morning left crowds of beach-goers agog and marine biologists bewildered.
"I've lived her for 10 years, and I've never seen anything like this. It's incredible," said Bob Ricci of Englewood.
Beach-goers reported that a wide variety of sea creatures came swimming south in a narrow band close to the beach at mid-morning.
Included in the swarm were clouds of shrimp, crab, grouper, snapper, red fish and flounder. They were joined by more usual species, including sea robins, needlefish and eels.

SHIPPING NEWS

Furniture causes FedEx fits

Instead of scouting street corners for a ratty, unwanted couch, Avila got creative and built an apartment full of surprisingly sturdy furniture -- out of FedEx shipping boxes.
Fanciful as his creations may seem, FedEx is not amused. The shipping giant's lawyers have sent Avila letters demanding he take down the site he created to document his project, invoking, among other things, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (.pdf), or DMCA.

GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT

Go Cindy, Go

Cindy Sheehan -- the 48-year-old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, killed in an ambush in Baghdad last year -- has, in the space of just a few days started, from a seemingly quixotic personal mission, something of a phenomenon with media swarming around her, leading liberal and antiwar activists parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice, and political experts in both parties working to assess what role she may have in galvanizing the public's gathering unhappiness with the increasing American casualties in Iraq.

SOLAR SYSTEM

New planet identified in Solar System

Astronomers say they have found a new planet in our Solar System, the first one bigger than Pluto since that object was discovered in 1930. The planet is also further away than Pluto, the furthest known planet, the researchers said. 
The planet, temporarily named 2003UB313, was found in an ongoing survey at Palomar Observatory’s Samuel Oschin telescope, he added. The observatory is on the Palomar Mountain near San Diego, Calif.
Pluto, while historically considered a planet, is more correctly termed a “Kuiper Belt Object,” -- the Kuiper Belt is an area of the solar system outside Neptune’s orbit, and which is believed to contain asteroids, comets, and icy bodies.
Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, it is also the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest Kuiper Belt Object.
Discoverers Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz said they first photographed the new planet on October 31, 2003. But it so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data last January. Since then, the scientists said, they have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

ANIMAL KINGDOM

Dog saves abandoned baby; carries her to litter of puppies

A newborn baby abandoned in a Kenyan forest was saved by a stray dog that apparently carried her across a busy road and through a barbed wire fence to a shed where the infant was discovered nestled with a litter of puppies, witnesses said Monday.
The baby girl, named "Angel" by hospital workers, was clad in a tattered shirt and wrapped in a plastic bag when the dog found her Friday, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the shed where the baby was discovered in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forest in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

DARK AGE

A New Bretton Woods: Time To Reverse George Shultz's Destruction of Exchange Controls

"We are caught, like a ship in a storm, within an already onrushing world crisis, which now threatens to plunge the planet as a whole into a new dark age. It were still possible to save the world economy from this horror; but, we shall not survive without abrupt, radical measures which would return us to President Franklin Roosevelt's intended unleashing of his intended, post-war implementation of the Bretton Woods monetary system. We either choose that option, or blame ourselves for the awful things which soon follow."

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Foreword to Earth's Next Fifty Years

The post-Bretton Woods floating exchange rate system is at disintegration point. Global financial speculation is wildly out of control, creating massive bubbles in property and derivatives markets, which threaten to blow, and driving up the price of oil toward $US100 per barrel. Global debt levels are unpayable, and the debt of one company alone, General Motors, which is over $US300 billion, is teetering just one grade above junk bond status, and threatens to explode the global financial system. As long forecast by U.S. physical economist Lyndon LaRouche, the world is on the brink of depression.

SCIENCE MATTERS

Experiment could help explain why we, and all things, exist

An new experiment involves shooting neutrinos underground between two sites 735km apart.
The neutrinos zip through Earth virtually unhindered because they’re largely immune to most of nature’s forces, including forces that make other particles bounce off each other rather than go through each other. In fact, trillions of naturally produced neutrinos pass harmlessly through you each second.
A detector at the mine site catches some of the neutrinos from the beam, though only about one in a billion, thanks to this same tendency of theirs to soar through things. The detector is built to analyze how the neutrinos have changed during their trip.
All this effort is supposed to help edge science toward an understanding of why material things in the universe, such as our bodies and all the stuff around us, exist.
Neutrinos are the only material particles that respond significantly to just one of the four known physical forces: the Weak force. The experiment might help solve a problem in accounting for matter’s existence.

The difficulty is that the universe contains both matter and a sort of mirror-image matter called antimatter. The two tend to merge and annihilate each other. So if the universe in its infancy contained equal amounts of each—as certain principles of physics suggest it should have—all the stuff would have long since disappeared.

[The project is called MINOS, for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search.]

DARK ACCELERATORS

Mystery objects stump astronomers

The two bizarre objects in our galaxy - which appear to be light-years wide, spew powerful radiation, yet appear pitch black - were detected in a survey of sources within our galaxy of very high-energy gamma rays.
The newfound objects are distinct from another, well known type of gamma-ray source called gamma-ray bursts—momentary flashes of gamma rays, detected about once a day, which astronomers think may signal the birth of black holes as dead stars abruptly shrink out of existence.

[The objects are not black holes, which generally are smaller and which, despite their name, do seem to emit visible light, though that light actually comes from around them and not inside them. Astronomers have dubbed the mystery objects dark accelerators.]

POLICE STATE

Police efforts 'amaze' Baxter protesters

Protesters say they are amazed at what they say is the brutality displayed by police during protests outside the Baxter detention centre in South Australia's north.
Police in full riot gear confiscated a number of kites and had previously charged at a crowd of protesters, popping several dozen helium filled balloons.
A large huddle of protesters carrying a big bunch of balloons marched towards the centre. More officers dressed in full riot gear then charged at the crowd, using sharp tools to pop all of the protesters' balloons.
Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition says the police behaviour has been over the top.
"It's hard to imagine a gentle, kinder natured protest than flying a kite and for people to be assaulted in the way they have been today by the STAR force officers is just beyond the pale," he said.


Baxter Detention Centre protesters forced us to act: police

Assistant Commissioner Burns says the officers were forced to act after protesters failed to heed police warnings about violating the restricted airspace around Baxter.
"They played a game of brinkmanship and provocation by continuing to fly kites after numerous requests not to," he said.

VOICE OF REASON

Media silence abets Ruddock's atrocities

One of Australia's leading barristers, Julian Burnside QC, has mounted a blistering attack on Australia's media, accusing it of refusing to report the government's escalating atrocities.
He can't even get publicity for his argument that Ruddock -- recently appointed Australia's first law officer without a murmour of protest from the mainstream media -- could be charged under Australian law with crimes against humanity. Apparently, according to one editor, that's not 'interesting'.

The Australian Criminal Code now recognises various acts as constituting crimes against humanity. Burnside QC has argued that Australia's system of mandatory, indefinite detention appears to satisfy each of the elements of the crime -- as outlined in the Rome statute by which the International Criminal Court was created -- and that careful analysis of the criminal code therefore suggests that Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard are guilty of crimes against humanity by virtue of their imprisonment of asylum seekers.

Tragically, it is unlikely that charges will be laid. The only person who can bring charges is the Attorney General: now that Mr Ruddock occupies that responsible office, there is not much cause to hope that he will investigate his own past misdeeds.

At the speech -- with Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone sitting metres away -- Burnside said “If moral arguments have no purchase, it remains the fact that our government is engaged in a continuing crime against humanity when assessed against its own legislative standards. I accuse Mr Howard and Mr Ruddock of that crime.
“I accuse Senator Vanstone of that crime. I expect that they will ignore this accusation, since the only person who can bring charges is the Attorney General of the Commonwealth.”
And, as predicted, Vanstone rose to her feet and spoke for a few minutes without once trying to rebut or defeat Burnside's claim.


Julian Burnside QC suggests citizens write to federal parliamentarians asking very simple, but hard, questions about the key aspects of refugee policy.

PANDEMIC PROPORTIONS

Man confirmed dead from bird flu

A 28-year-old man from Cambodia has died of bird flu at a hospital in the capital, the second victim of the deadly virus in the kingdom, the health minister said Thursday.
The victim came a village 20 kilometres away from the home of the first victim who died in January.

DEMOCRACY DEBATE

Jimmy Carter to chair Election Reform Commission

Former President Jimmy Carter will lead a bipartisan commission to examine problems with the U.S. election system, American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management said on Thursday.
Carter, a Democrat whose Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections around the world, will co-chair the private commission with Republican James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush.
Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat who lost his seat in the 2004 election, will also participate.
'I am concerned about the state of our electoral system and believe we need to improve it,' Carter said in a statement. He said the group will assess 'issues of inclusion' in federal voting and propose recommendations to improve the process.

Disputes over recounts and voter eligibility marred the 2000 U.S. presidential election and concerns emerged in the November 2004 poll about exceedingly long lines that kept voters from the polls in several states including Ohio, whose 20 electoral college votes ultimately decided the election in President Bush's favor.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Lawsuit filed to obtain flight 77 videos

On the morning of september 11th, 2001 the FBI visited at least two private businesses near the pentagon and confiscated several security camera video tapes.
Business #1 is the cigto gas station with several security cameras aimed in the direction of the pentagon. Flight 77 flew directly over the gas station at an altitude of roughly 50 feet, less than 3 seconds from impact.
Business #2 is the sheraton national hotel. It is known, based upon a prior FOIA report filed by CNN which requested the tapes - that the sheraton's security cameras DID capture the plane - however because of national security, the FBI won't release the video.

WEIRD SCIENCE

Underground Extra-terrestrial UFO bases all around the world

Geologists in the East and West coasts are busy understanding a new theory that shows possible underground UFO bases all around the world.
According to this theory the UFO bases are along the interface of the seven large and many small tectonic plates meet each other.
[Story fails to name a geologist.]

TALIBAN IN SUITS

Fundamentalism influences Government in Schiavo case

"The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model."