EARTH CHANGES

Claims US gagging climate expert

NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, director of the US space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has accused the Bush administration of trying to stop him from speaking out on emissions of greenhouse gases


[Dr Hansen says that "efforts to quiet him" had begun in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on December 6, 2005, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. ]

CYBER CENSORSHIP

Big Internet ISPs snub appeals to join stand against Chinese censorship

Leading US-based Internet companies are showing little interest in attending a Congressional briefing on worries that the firms are bending to the wishes of China's censors.
Microsoft and Cisco Systems have refused to attend the event, while Google and Yahoo are non-committal, officials said.

[Google's Chinese site restricts locals from searching for information about Tibetan independence, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the banned spiritual sect "Falungong," and Taiwan. ]

EARTH CHANGES

Warming hits 'tipping point'

A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.
Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

[The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere]

Melting of permafrost threatens homes and roads

Global warming could melt almost all of the top layer of Arctic permafrost by the end of the century. Scientists say the thaw would release vast stocks of carbon into the atmosphere, threaten ocean currents and wreck roads and buildings across Canada, Alaska and Russia.

ENDLESS WAR

New book recaps the disintegrating history of the 21st century

The US government engineered 9/11 as a pretext for permanent war. This bold plan was successful because of the media/pharmaceutical anesthesitization of the American populace over a period of 40 years, from the Kennedy assassination to the imminent beginning of World War Three in Iran.
The real money has always been made in wars and financial collapses. Current indicators are that we are about to get both.
The responsibility for this chosen course lies with the corporate establishment, which has gentrified itself right out of the human species.

SWEET NOTHINGS

Legislative Process To Ban Aspartame

Fifteen New Mexico state senators sponsored a bill to rid New Mexico of what some have called "Rumsfeld's Disease.
A senate bill to rid New Mexico of what has been called “Rumsfeld’s Disease” has been introduced supporting legislation to ban the deadly artificial sweetener, aspartame.
Linked to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his efforts in the 1970s for putting the sweetener on the market, New Mexico is the first state to consider banning the artificial additive linked to numerous ill-health affects, including cancer.

[A recent report from a highly respected international medical team has now linked the toxins in aspartame to lymphomas and leukemia. The report by Morando Soffritti "Aspartame induces lymphomas and leukemias in rats" is in the European Journal of Oncology for July, 2005. Dr. Sofritti is a member of the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences Cancer Research Centre in Bologna, Italy.]

PAPAL BULL?

Mystery of Pope's night-time visits to his old haunts

Over the past few weeks, the German pontiff has been seen sneaking back to his old room outside the Vatican.
At about 9pm a plain, dark car carrying 78-year-old Pope Benedict and his private secretary, Don Georg Gaenswein, swirls out of a side door of Vatican city. It then doubles round in the back streets before arriving at his former hall of residence as a cardinal for almost 24 years.
The Pope gets out of the car disguised in the plain black priest's robes he wore when he was the Catholic Church's senior theologian. Wearing a black hat and with his head down, he opens the wooden door and tiptoes inside followed by Gaenswein.
"Its is not a question of just dashing in for a few minutes to grab a bag or a book," La Stampa said. "He spends at least a couple of hours there."

HISTORY REPEATS

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)


Like boiling a frog

What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think.... for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated..... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us...

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'..... must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing..... Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. "You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone ... you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. "You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father .....could never have imagined."

TERROR TACTICS

New claims of Guantanamo torture

Amnesty International has highlighted the case of Jumah al-Dossari - a 32-year-old Bahraini who was taken to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002.
His lawyer said Mr Dossari had been urinated on, threatened with rape and had his head repeatedly smashed against the floor. The claims have been denied by the US government.
He had reportedly attempted to commit suicide 10 times, the rights group said.
Another detainee, Sami al-Hajj - a Sudanese cameraman for Arab satellite TV network al-Jazeera - had been subjected to severe physical, sexual and religious abuse over the last four years, his British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith said.
Amnesty's UK Campaigns Director, Stephen Bowen, called the situation at Guantanamo Bay "shocking".

[BBC link]