PANIC ROOM

FBI alert: terrorists may be armed with almanacs

The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular annual reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.
In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs 'to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning.' It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.

[Forever, people in power have been afraid of fiction. Wild imaginings threaten to undermine the view of the world as unchangeable, the easy idea that history is set in its course like footprints in cement. Novels, poetry, plays, and even pornography have been confiscated, burned and banned in both dangerous and safe, settled times. Maybe the US government's alert regarding people carrying books of facts, was a turning point. More ...]

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

The Pancam calibration target, in the shape of a sundial, will allow scientists to adjust images from Mars.

Spirit Mars Lander sends first pictures

NASA's Spirit Mars Lander began sending back pictures of its immediate surroundings in the Gusev Crater.
The rover component of the lander carries a panoramic camera, a microscopic imager, a number of navigation cameras and other instruments. These include a miniaturized thermal emission spectrometer which can determine the mineral composition of rock from a distance, a Mossbauer spectrometer especially designed to determine the composition of iron-rich rock, and an x-ray spectrometer which will determine the elemental chemistry of rocks and soils.
More on the instrument package ...

SKY IS FALLING

Meteorite hits Iran

A meteorite has hit northern Iran causing minor damage to property but there were no immediate reports of casualties, state radio has said. The impact sent locals in panic onto the streets in the northern town of Babol in Mazandaran province.
"A meteorite which hit Babol on Friday morning caused only some minor damage to residential units," radio said, without giving further details or citing any source. It said the impact was felt up to one kilometre away.
A member of the family on whose house the comet fell tells the story: “I woke up in the morning and suddenly saw an amazing light which was moving toward the house, just then I heard a horrible crash and when I came to myself I found our house totally destroyed.”

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Army drops cowardice charge against soldier

Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, 32, an Army interrogator assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group, was charged with cowardice Oct. 14 after suffering what he described as a panic attack from seeing a mangled body of an Iraqi man who had been cut in half by American gunfire in Iraq.
After he asked for counseling, Pogany’s commanders sent him back to Fort Carson to face a court-martial on a cowardice charge, which can be punishable by death. The Army later replaced it with the lesser dereliction-of-duty charge, which could have put Pogany behind bars for six months.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

America: The real danger lies within

n 2003, the US saw an abject, cowardly Congress violate its duty as the republic's premier political organ by disgracefully handing the barely elected president carte blanche to wage an unprovoked war against Iraq that was justified by a torrent of ludicrous lies worthy of Dr. Goebbels. Lies and propaganda that were packaged in the best tradition of Soviet agitprop as news, then force-fed by a servile media to an ill-informed public shockingly deficient in any sense of history, geography, or foreign affairs.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Video shows US marines thrilled by the kill as shown on CNN. Note the scrolling text at the foot of the screen announcing a Passion Play about the torture and killing of Jesus Christ.

Another proud moment in US military history: Marines execute an Iraqi to the cheers of fellow soldiers

CROWLEY: Wounded, another Iraqi writhes on the ground next to his gun. The Marines kill him -- then cheer.
RIDDLE: Like, man, you guys are dead now, you know. But it was a good feeling.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fire!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah!
CROWLEY: When the battle is over and you are still standing, the adrenalin rush is huge.
RIDDLE: I mean, afterwards you're like, hell, yeah, that was awesome. Let's do it again.
CROWLEY: Inexplicable to some, but not to generations of veterans

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

US 'may need a bigger army' says Rumsfeld

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- already in charge of the largest defence budget in the world, greater than the next 14 countries combined -- has said 'we may need a bigger army'.
Rumsfeld has been under pressure from Congress to expand the military by at least two divisions, or 20,000 troops.

GONAD GRABBING

Conservatives Target Testicles

This week US ultra-right-wing conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh rolled out a 'funny' faux advertisement for the 'Hillary Clinton Testicle Lock Box' that now any woman can use to clamp down on men's testicles just like Hillary does.
This was part of a sophisticated psychological operations program by conservatives that explicitly targets working men in America, and dates back to research first done for Richard Nixon.
Today's working poor and middle-class men, living with job insecurity and a declining standard of living, feel emasculated. Their ability to earn a living is eroding, and, with it, their sense of their own potency, their ability to project themselves onto the world and "conquer" it in a way that meets the needs of their family. The result is becoming conspicuous: working men are getting angry or falling into despair.

Boys lose penises after botched circumcisions

Five African youths have had their penises amputated after botched circumcisions in the Eastern Cape since the beginning of November, the provincial health department said on Friday.

ENTROPY FALLS APART

Beads of doubt: breaking the second law of thermodynamics

Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have carried out an experiment involving lasers and microscopic beads that disobeys the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, something many scientists had considered impossible. The law describess entropy: the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
The finding has implications for nanotechnology - the design and construction of molecular machines. They may not work as expected.
It may also help scientists better understand DNA and proteins, molecules that form the basis of life and whose behaviour in some circumstances is not fully explained.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Lost? hiding? Your mobile phone is keeping tabs

Families and employers are adopting surveillance technology once used mostly to track soldiers and prisoners. New electronic services with names like uLocate and Wherify Wireless make a very personal piece of information for cellphone users — physical location — harder to mask.
Privacy advocates say the lack of legal clarity about who can gain access to location information poses a serious risk.
The new generation of tracking devices takes many forms, from plastic bracelets that can be locked onto children to small boxes with tiny antennae that can be placed unobtrusively in cars.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

A dishevelled Saddam Hussein and a shevelled Nora al Tamimi

Kurds captured Saddam, not US

Saddam Hussein was captured by American soldiers only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for US troops to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.
Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, quoting a senior British military intelligence officer.

Daughter of slain Iraqi opposition leader says US helped Saddam in 1993 to quash coup attempt

The daughter of a prominent Iraqi opposition leader, who was assassinated in Beirut by Saddam Hussein's secret service in 1994 said the US was a virtual accomplice in her father's murder.
Nora al Tamimi said her father Taleb al Suhail al Tamimi had planned a coup d'etat to overthrow Saddam in1993. "But the Americans, who did not want the coup to succeed possibly because they were certain my father would not go along with their polices, tipped off Saddam about the impending putsch by my father and gave the names of his top aides," Nora said. "All of them died in Saddam's torture chambers."

TIME Person of the Year: The American Soldier

The US GI is TIME's Person of the Year: "They swept across Iraq and conquered it in 21 days. They stand guard on streets pot-holed with skepticism and rancor. They caught Saddam Hussein. They are the face of America, its might and good will, in a region unused to democracy."

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

DeLay says US should return to moon for strategic reasons

America must establish a more robust and permanent human presence in space, starting with our return to the moon, said US Office of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
'It's time our space program took on a new mission, a new vision, a new calling,' DeLay said. 'In an age of dynamic technological advancement and military uncertainty, a national commitment to space is not a voluntary initiative: it is a strategic imperative.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Albright thinks Bush hiding bin Laden

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Fox News Channel analyst Morton Kondracke yesterday she suspects President Bush knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and is simply waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture.
Kondracke made the announcement about what Albright told him backstage before an appearance on another Fox show on 'Special Report With Brit Hume.'
Kondracke was incredulous that a former secretary of state could believe something like that about a U.S. administration.

HOT SPOTS

US embassy says 'throw in the towel' - leave Saudi Arabia

A travel warning was issued to alert Americans to security concerns, the Department of State authorized the departure of family members and non-emergency employees of the US Embassy and Consulates on a voluntary basis. "Private American citizens should evaluate their own security situations and should consider departing the country," the travel warning said. It superseded an earlier warning issued on December 8, 2003.

OUR GALAXY

Projected birds-eye view of the Milky Way, based on a census of 500,000 stars.

New arm of Milky Way galaxy discovered

Australian astronomers have discovered an extra cosmic arm in the Milky Way that they believe wraps around the outskirts of the vast galaxy like a thick gas border.
Astronomers at scientific research group, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), hope the find will help paint a better picture of the Milky Way galaxy, which is home to Earth.
CSIRO scientist Naomi McClure-Griffiths said the gas border, which is 6500 light years thick, showed the Milky Way had a structure similar to those of most other galaxies, which have gassy spiral arms extending beyond the more central stellar spiral arms.

Our growing, breathing galaxy

Long assumed to be a relic of the distant past, the Milky Way turns out to be a dynamic, living object.
The Milky Way is not a finished work but rather a body that is still forming. This realization has relied heavily on observing other galaxies and bringing the lessons back home. Our galaxy is tearing apart small satellite galaxies and incorporating their stars. Meanwhile gas clouds are continually arriving from intergalactic space. No longer can researchers speak of galaxy formation in the past tense.

BIG TIP OFF

Malaysia moots cross-cultural male circumcision

The Malasian prime minister's religious affairs adviser has suggested that circumcision can bring Malaysians of all races and religions together.
Dr Abdul Hamid Othman said that with the growing popularity of circumcision among the country's non-Muslim minorities - who see it as good hygienic practice - they too could be invited to join in the celebrations with their Muslim friends.
Circumcision is a rite of passage for young Muslim boys, and in Malaysia it is common for the ceremony to become an event with dozens, or even hundreds of boys being circumcised together.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Congressman questions timing of Saddam capture

Washington Democrat Jim McDermott claimed the U.S. could have found Saddam 'a long time ago if they wanted.' Asked if he thought the weekend capture was timed to help Bush, McDermott chuckled and said: 'Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing.'
McDermott said: 'I don't know that it was definitely planned on this weekend, but I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was. It was just a matter of time till they'd find him.

GENIE REBOTTLED

A net of control

Developments in technology, law and commerce seem to be directed toward changing the open nature of the Internet. Internet II will create opportunities for business and government to control and monitor cyberspace.
Soon, it is feared by some expert analysts, nothing will be allowed to even appear on the Internet without having a proper technical authorization.

THE REVISION THING

Saddam key in early CIA plot

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.
In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as 'a horrible orgy of bloodshed.'
According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that 'freaked everybody out' according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Journalists face jail under laws

Journalists face up to five years' jail if they report detailed circumstances surrounding the detention and questioning of terrorism suspects, under new ASIO laws passed in Parliament late last week.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock believes the secrecy provisions 'enhance' Australia's national security and counter terrorism capabilities and 'protect' the effectiveness of intelligence gathering. But media organisations and Greens senator Bob Brown have warned that the limitations on the reporting of ASIO activities threaten democracy.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Diebold vote machine paper trail "too expensive"

The politically-connected ATM giant Diebold - which is bidding for many electronic voting contracts across the US - plans to make the modifications to their new machines so expensive that city and state officials balk at the cost.
The modifications sought are to provide a verifiable paper trail. Incredibly, the e-voting terminals currently do not leave behind such information.

MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Perpetual war, perpetual terror

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Saddam: US caught the wrong guy

Saddam Hussein, former employee of the American federal government, was captured near a farmhouse in Tikrit in a raid performed by other employees of the American federal government. That sounds pretty deranged, right? Perhaps, but it is also accurate. The unifying thread binding together everyone assembled at that Tikrit farmhouse is the simple fact that all of them – the soldiers as well as Hussein – have received pay from the United States for services rendered.
It is no small irony that Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, the monster under your bed lo these last twelve years, was paid probably ten thousand times more during his time as an American employee than the soldiers who caught him on Saturday night.

TECHNOPHILE RAMPAGE

Wal-Mart shoppers trample woman who was first in line for DVD sale

A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Florida Wal-Mart Supercentre.
Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance.
Wal-Mart officials called the woman's family, and the store apologized and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her.

MAN V. MAN

Judge orders man blinded

A judge has ruled that a Pakistani man convicted of attacking his 17-year-old fiancee with acid be blinded with acid himself, police said Friday.
Mohammed Sajid, 19, poured acid on the face of his fiancee Rabia Bibi on June 24 in Bahawalpur, a city in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab. His two brothers were also convicted of taking part.
The woman lost both eyes and her face was burned in the attack, which police said followed a minor dispute between the couple.

MIND CONTROL

Man shot dead on Kennedy 'X'

A man apparently shot himself dead early on Friday on the 'X' in Dealey Plaza that marks the spot where President John F Kennedy was assassinated 40 years ago, authorities said.
Witnesses said they saw a man in a camouflage jacket holding a gun on his chest and lying in the middle of the street on the spraypainted 'X', an unofficial memorial maintained by the publisher of a local conspiracy-theory publication.

EARTH CHANGES

Magnetic field is fading

In the movie 'The Core,' Earth's molten core stops spinning, with dire effects on the magnetic field that protects the planet from energy-charged particles from the Sun. People with pacemakers fall dead in the street; the Golden Gate Bridge collapses.
Scientists have known for some time that the magnetic field is in fact collapsing, at a rate faster than it would if flows of molten iron in the core had stopped completely.
And while the consequences would be nowhere near as catastrophic as those in the movie, geophysicists increasingly wonder whether the magnetic field has begun one of its occasional reversals that in the next few thousand years might lead to compasses pointing south instead of north.

OIL WAR

Fuel queues could be a tinderbox

With lines for gasoline stretching for miles and drivers forced to wait an entire day to fill their tanks, fuel shortages have emerged as a potent political issue with the potential to ignite civil unrest across the country. Two American soldiers were killed recently while standing guard over long lines at gas stations, and many Iraqis warn that the kind of widespread rioting that broke out in August in the city of Basra may be just around the corner.
Frequent power disturbances have shut down refineries for days at a time. So far, Kellogg, Brown Root, the unit of Halliburton paid by the American government to repair the oil infrastructure, has not offered to help. A spokeswoman for Halliburton said that the refinery was not damaged by the war and so was not a high priority for repairs, and that plant managers cannot expect to get all the equipment and technical help they need immediately.

[As Democrats demand further investigations of Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, President Bush says Halliburton Co. should repay the government if it overcharged for fuel in Iraq.}

CLOAK AND DAGGER

'Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.' -- US confirms Saddam captured alive

The US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer said Saddam Hussein, 66, was seized during a pre-dawn raid near his hometown of Tikrit, north of the capital Baghdad. 'Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,' Mr Bremer told a press conference in Baghdad.
US forces commander in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, said Saddam put up no resistance when he was found hiding in a two-metre deep hole, and was co-operating with his captors.
As the video was played the press room erupted with cheers and catcalls at the fallen dictator.
Lust for power matched only by ruthless streak.

[Now, does the name Osama ring andy bells?]

BIO WARFARE

Flu outbreak sweeps across US

The flu is spreading across the United States and the government is concerned enough to buy up 250,000 available doses of the vaccine to make sure it goes to those who need it most. Goverrnment health agencies are saving diminishing vaccine supplies for those at high risk of the flu including children between 6 months and 23 months.

NEW WORLD ORDER

US unleashes 'Avalanche' in Afghanistan

The United States military says it has launched its biggest-ever ground offensive in Afghanistan.
It involves 2,000 troops as well as soldiers from the Afghan army.
Many areas of Afghanistan have become too dangerous for aid workers.
A coalition spokesman says four American infantry battalions and troops from the Afghan national army are involved in Operation Avalanche.

[Nothing to do with protection of this season's huge opium poppy crop, of course.]

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Top secret advisor to four Presidents dies 'violently' In DC

Gus W. Weiss, 72, adviser to four presidents on top secret policy matters, died violently in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2003, but his death was not reported by The Washington Post until December 7 -- in the obitiuary section at the bottom of page C12.
His home town newspaper, The Nashville Tennessean, was a week late in reporting his death, but said, "The circumstances surrounding his death could not be confirmed last night."
Readers of The Tennessean might have had their suspicions aroused not only by the delay in the reporting of this important man's death, but also by the very next sentence in the article: "Friends of Mr. Weiss expressed shock at his death."
The Washington Post reported that Mr Weiss -- who had in the past been honoured with CIA's Medal for Merit and the National Security Agency's Cipher Medal -- died in a fall from a Watergate East residential building and that the D.C. medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
The Tennessean obituary said Harris Gilbert, a Nashville attorney who had been friends with Mr. Weiss since childhood said Weiss 'was very interested in diplomatic strategy and was very, very opposed to the Iraq war. It was the first military action he ever opposed'.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

George W. Bush resume

LAW ENFORCEMENT:
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been 'lost' and is not available.
MILITARY:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.
COLLEGE:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader. more...

WATCH THE SKIES

UFO spotted by UK motorists during morning rush-hour

THE appearance of a UFO in the sky above a Scottish retail park last week caused spooked drivers to bump their cars with several morning commuters reporting a huge silver object in the sky. Drivers were so distracted by the bizarre sighting that at least two minor accidents were reported.
A winess said, "my friend saw something hovering, which was silver in appearance and looked like the dishes you see on the side of television transmitters.
"It was huge, and it was pulsating - he wasn't the only one who saw it, as you couldn't have missed it. He saw it and just said: 'Good God', and was really quite shaken by the whole thing. Then the object just suddenly disappeared - it was so strange."

PRIVATE LIVES

Cybercrime push 'imperils personal security'

President Bush this week urged Senators to back the adoption of a Council of Europe Cybercrime treaty into US law. But Privacy International (PI), the human rights watchdog, warns that if the Senate ratifies the Treaty, "dozens of countries will have 'on demand' access to the personal information and communications records of any American they may wish to investigate".
This data - including full email logs, phone records and mobile phone location data together with account and financial records - could be "cherry picked" by investigating authorities in countries that ratify the treaty.
The treaty, designed to streamline cooperation between signatory countries, will significant expand the power of investigators to access data and prosecute offences ranging from copyright infringement to "hate speech".

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Losing the battle for hearts and minds

Mohammed Ali Karam wants to kill a U.S. soldier. He doesn't love Saddam Hussein, and he was happy in April when U.S. Marines rolled through his Baghdad neighborhood on their way to liberate the capital. But he turned against the Americans the night he saw his brother Hussein, 27, take two bullets in the neck. At 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 17, Karam says, he and three of his brothers were driving to a neighborhood where the pumps were working in order to get water for their home. Hussein, in the passenger seat, talked excitedly about having his new suit tailored for his upcoming wedding. That's when 82nd Airborne paratroopers, crouched in an observation post across the street, opened fire — after rounds struck their position, they say. Three of the brothers ran to the safety of a creek bed, but Hussein didn't make it. In the car, said Karam, the soldiers found Hussein — gurgling blood through his throat — but no weapons. Hussein died on the way to the hospital — three days before his wedding.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Rumsfeld wins 'Foot in Mouth' award

A bizarre comment by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has been awarded the 'Foot in Mouth' prize by Britain's Plain English Campaign.
Mr Rumsfeld, renowned for his uncompromising tough talking, received the prize for the most baffling comment by a public figure.
'Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know,' Rumsfeld told a press briefing.
'We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
'But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.'

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

SA fossil could change evolution theories

The oldest fossil ever discovered was in China and it proved that animals with backbones - thought to be our forebears - probably lived in that region 530 million years ago.
Now scientists may have to re-set their evolutionary clock back a further 25 million years because of a fossil discovered in South Australia's Flinders Ranges.
The six centimetre long tadpole-shaped fossil is estimated to be 550 million years old. Most fossils of this era are similar to jellyfish or seaweed, but this appears to be a chordate, meaning it has a primitive backbone and therefore might be the earliest link in the evolutionary chain.

THE OTHERS

The Extraterestrial Exposure Law, like Patriot Act for ETs

If the US government claims to know nothing of aliens, U.F.O.'s, or anything pertaining to them, then why did they make up the 'Extraterestrial Exposure Law'? It is found in Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It is the law that made it illegal for the public to come in contact with extra-terrestrials or their vehicles. The law states that Anyone found guilty of such contact could face up to one year imprisonment as well as a fine of $5000. Also, any individual who had been "exposed" could be quarantined under armed guard by the NASA administrator without a hearing.
The law was passed originally to protect Earth from possible biological contamination resulting from the US Apollo Space Program.

Halliburton

Cheney denies helping old firm to land Iraqi contracts
US Vice-President Dick Cheney has denied helping his former oil services company get multibillion-dollar US Government contracts in Iraq.
Democrats have questioned the role of Mr Cheney's former firm, Halliburton, in rebuilding Iraq. The company, headed by Mr Cheney before he became Vice-President, has contracts worth nearly $2 billion.
Mr Cheney bristled at the suggestion that his connection influenced the awarding of the no-bid contracts to Halliburton. September 2003

Cheney may avoid some embarrasing business
With a co-defendant's guilty plea, the focus of a federal weapons case shifts back to its key figure, David Hudak of Vancouver, accused of amassing thousands of warheads and training foreign troops in counterterrorist strategies in Roswell.
Hudak, president of Roswell-based High Energy Access Tools Inc., or HEAT, and co-defendant Michael Payne were arrested one year ago when the missiles were found. Payne pleaded guilty last month, acknowledging that he helped train soldiers from the United Arab Emirates in marksmanship and counterterrorism.
The prosecution had asked to have any mention of US Vice President Dick Cheney or Halliburton excluded from the case, contending Cheney joined Halliburton after the missile deal was finalized.
- August 2003

Halliburton agrees to settle accounting suits
Halliburton Co. said Friday it has agreed to pay $6 million to settle 20 shareholder lawsuits that accused it of using deceptive accounting practices while Vice President Dick Cheney led the company.
The lawsuits challenged the way that the oilfield-services company counted revenue from cost overruns and change orders on long-term fixed-price construction projects.
- June 2003

Cheney still paid by Pentagon's Iraq cleanup contractor
Halliburton, the Texas company which has been awarded the Pentagon's contract to put out potential oil-field fires in Iraq and which is bidding for postwar construction contracts, is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.
- March 3003

Weapons of mass distraction
The Vice President, Dick Cheney, is now facing a civil law suit for fraud from the NGO Judicial Watch. This alleges that the Vice President and others inflated the earnings of Halliburton, a company he ran, in order to raise the share price.
- Oct 2002

SKY IS FALLING

Recent meteor reports from the alienation news archives

Recovered meteor reveals solar secrets
Meteoric metal found in crop circle
Metoer smashes through ceiling
Sonic boom likely caused by meteor

HOME GENETICS

DIY DNA analysis kit, a must-have this Christmas

This kit from Discovery Kids -- the first to feature a bona fide centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber -- will turn your kid on to the intricacies of genetics. Realistic lab equipment transforms the kitchen into a forensics lab, where your breakfast-bar biologist can extract clumps of real DNA from fruits and vegetables or solve "crimes" by revealing DNA "fingerprints" -- telltale blue protein stripes in a gel mixture.

OUR GALAXY

Dusty disc indicates Earth-like planets


The star, Vega, is one of the brightest in the sky, only 25 light-years away. It is three times larger than our Sun and, at 350 million years old, much younger as well. Vega has a disc of dust circling it, and at least one large planet which could sweep debris aside allowing smaller worlds like Earth to exist.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN

Hope dies for Africa's lost generation

Carol will let one of the men buy her a beer and maybe dance with her for a while. Then they will leave and head off into the night towards a guest house she knows where they can hire a room. He will give her maybe 20,000 kwacha, a little less than £3. If she can fit in another couple of men during the day, she will have earned enough to settle the bill for the room and to buy herself a little food. It is not good money, even by Zambian standards, but for a 13-year-old orphaned by AIDS, with nowhere to live and no-one to pay for her schooling, it is the best she can hope for. Carol has been doing this since she was 11.
Fragile and tiny, Carol sits sucking her thumb, spilling out her pathetic story - parents dead, nowhere to live, no means to pay for the rest of her schooling, friends who told her she could maybe make enough this way to live. She has been raped, she says, and beaten.

[Across sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that 25 million children will lose one or both their parents by 2010.]

GUN NUTS

One-shot kill: new 9mm round has explosive impact

Ben Thomas and three colleagues were driving north out of Baghdad when gunmen opened fire on them. In a brief but intense firefight, Thomas hit one of the attackers with a single shot from his M4 carbine at a distance he estimates was 100 to 110 yards. He hit the man in the buttocks to kill the assailant instantly.
“It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach ... everything was torn apart,” Thomas said.
Thomas, a security consultant with a private company contracted by the government, recorded the first known enemy kill using a new — and controversial — bullet, an armor-piercing, limited-penetration round manufactured by RBCD of San Antonio.
The bullet is so controversial that if Thomas, a former SEAL, had been on active duty, he would have been court-martialed for using it.

[Conclusions: The US military is becoming privatised to avoid legal/constitutional problems which may arise from using illegal ammunition or perhaps even shooting people in the back(side).
The 9mm round weighs 60g and is quite expensive at US$35 for a box of 20.]

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

US takes steps to ensure future conquests do not turn sour

Senior Pentagon officials are currently considering plans to set up two 15,000-strong divisions that would be dedicated to overseeing the reconstruction of countries in the aftermath of future military campaigns. It is understood their use has been included in Pentagon wargaming of potential invasions of countries such as Iran, Syria and North Korea.
As part of its ongoing 'transformation' project, the Pentagon has recently been updating wargame scenarios for these areas and concluded the United States can win battles faster and with fewer troops than previously been thought possible.

NEW WORLD ORDER

911 victim’s wife sues Bush

Ellen Mariani's husband Louis Neil Mariani was aboard United Air Lines flight 175 when it was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Now she wants those responsible to face justice. For that reason she and her lawyers are invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and is alleging President Bush and officials including, but not limited to Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Feinberg that they: had knowledge/warnings of 911 and failed to warn or take steps to prevent the action; have been covering up the truth of 911; and have therefore violated the laws of the United States under the Civil RICO Act.
Mariani's amended complaint intends to expose the truth to remember the dead and to prevent continued deaths of American military personnel due to President Bush's "failure to act and prevent" the worst attacks on our nation since Pearl Harbor. [Global Free Press item.]

DOLCE VITA

How aspartame became legal

In 1985 Monsanto purchased G.D. Searle, the chemical company that held the patent to aspartame, the active ingredient in NutraSweet. Monsanto was apparently untroubled by aspartame's clouded past, including a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry, comprised of three independent scientists, which confirmed that it 'might induce brain tumors.'
The FDA had actually banned aspartame based on this finding, only to have Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld (currently the Secretary of Defense) vow to 'call in his markers,' to get it approved.
On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener, and Reagan's new FDA commissioner, Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision.
It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision, but Hull then installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame's favor. Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, served briefly as Provost at New York Medical College, and then took a position with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and GD Searle. Since that time he has never spoken publicly about aspartame.

WATCH THE SKIES

Another UFO sighted above Baku

Another UFO was observed in various parts of the Azerbaijan capital Baku. In a cloudless sky a large light stain similar to an extended "drop of milk" has appeared.
The abnormal object has caused interest not only among the people of Baku, but also Azerbaijani experts. Professor Elchin Khalilov, chief of a commission on the abnormal phenomena at the presidium of Academy of Sciences, caught the UFO on video. Mr. Khalilov has noted that they had already started to study the video.

MYSTERIOUS DNA

DNA puzzle of mother 'made of two women'

A mother-of-three has discovered she is not the biological parent of two of her naturally conceived sons and is in fact made up of two women.
Scientists came to the extraordinary conclusion that the 52-year-old was formed from two non-identical twin girl embryos which fused into a single person in her mother's womb.
Tests carried out on the woman - known as Jane - showed she had two distinct types of DNA in her body.

WILL POWER

Mr Prahlad Jani under surveillance in hospital

Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians

Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades - but is still in perfect health.
Prahlad Jani, a holy man, or fakir, who is over 70 years old, has just spent 10 days under constant observation in Sterling Hospital, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.
During that time, he did not consume anything and 'neither did he pass urine or stool', according to the hospital's deputy superintendent, Dr Dinesh Desai.
Yet he is in fine mental and physical fettle, say doctors.

THE MONOPOLY GAME

Superstores killing the community

A report published by the National Retail Planning Forum shows that the opening of a superstore costs, on average, a net 276 local jobs, as independent grocers, village shops, newsagents, milk rounds and pharmacists are closed down in droves.

Also, in November 2001, after an investigation by the Competition Commission had found, among other things, that the chains 'adversely affect the competitiveness of some of their suppliers with the result that the suppliers are likely to invest and spend less on new products and innovation, leading to lower quality and less consumer choice' a code of practice was introduced.
It turned out to have been watered down, from the draft version, by the Department of Trade and Industry after the government had consulted with the supermarkets but, according to England's National Farmers Union, 'virtually excluded' everyone else. In the opinion of the Soil Association, indeed, the code was so watered down 'it simply legitimises the worst practices of the supermarkets' ... more.

MARK OF THE BEAST

When cash is only skin deep

A subdermal (under-the-skin) microchip -- that uses radio frequency signals to broadcast an identification number to a scanner -- could someday replace credit and debit cards.
Applied Digital Solutions CEO Scott Silverman said that rather than swiping a bank card to make purchases, micro-chipped customers would scan themselves using special readers.
Radio frequency identification, or RFID, are already commonplace in some areas.
ExxonMobil's Speedpass system already uses a scanner integrated into a fuel bowser: fuel purchases are charged to a credit card account within seconds.
Recently, McDonald's restaurants in Chicago started using the Speedpass system. And in an interview with USA Today, a senior MasterCard executive said the company was considering integrating its RFID technology into items, such as pens or earrings.
"Ultimately, it could be embedded in anything -- someday, maybe even under the skin," the executive said.

[Applied Digital has attracted scorn from some fundamentalist Christians, who believe that its VeriChip is the fabled "mark of the beast" of biblical lore. According to the book of Revelation (Ch 13), Satan will someday force people to "receive a mark" on their hands or foreheads in order to buy or sell.
Verse 16: "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name."]

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

The type of image Americans are no longer permitted to see in mainstream media.

Curtains ordered for media coverage of returning coffins

Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.
To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

[Also: Reasons 'Dubya' has avoided attending a military funeral.]

THIS NON PHYSICAL LIFE

What I learned out of body

In this 21st Century, the Age of Technology, we are still plagued by religious beliefs that are a contributing cause toward terrorism, killings and wars between nations. Belief in a deity, who keeps causing catastrophes, punishes people, and created the universe out of nothingness as if by magic was brought about by hysteria and superstitions. This thought process needs to be reassessed and brought up to date. Open-minded people must use common sense to determine whether this so-called deity was incorrectly perceived, misinterpreted and misunderstood by the masses of a bygone era.
Some will say that my personal experience of oneness with a supreme spirit is nothing but a dream or a vivid imagination. It doesn't matter whether you accept or totally reject my story. What does matter is that we evolve to a point whereby we can encourage open-minded people to offer feedback on how our religious beliefs can be brought into the 21st century.
My concept is that God is a spiritual unity, a oneness, a structured government-like "Spiritual Collective"; the "Progressive and Accumulative Spiritual Intelligence" of the universe existing in the spiritual fourth dimension; a collective of the righteous souls who have passed into the spiritual realm; a spiritual continuity.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Specially trained Miami police have their say on free speech in the US: "Shut the fuck up or get shot".

A sad day for Miami ... and freedom

What I describe below is the experience of a middle-class woman, a wife and mother who is simply a citizen of the U.S. concerned about the state of her nation. I do not have a shaved-head, tattoos or multiple piercings, and have not been running around with a sling-shot (as has been rumored about the Free Trade Agreement protesters). I have never destroyed someone else’s personal or private property (nor do I ever intend to) but I do take my first amendment rights very seriously and that is why I am writing this.
Over 800 million people in the Western Hemisphere will be affected by the FTAA negotiations that are going on here in Miami and as I witnessed last night, there is a huge campaign of intimidation and coercion to keep people from expressing the powerful tool of many voices -- demonstrating in the streets as a form of protest.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Michael Jackson story is a plot

U.S. president George W. Bush and his posse, along with their pals in the boardrooms of Big Media, may have hatched a scheme to dumb down the nation so that they can inflict their will upon the world while American voters are transfixed on "Bachelor Bob" burning the beef on the barbecue.
How else to explain last Thursday's orgy of Michael Jackson coverage on CNN — hours of choppercam shots of airport runways and police station parking lots — on the day that Bush was being trashed in effigy in London, 27 people were killed and 400 injured by truck bombs in Turkey, a U.S.-Canada task force report on the causes of August's massive blackout was released and who knows how many U.S. troops were becoming casualties in Iraq?
Was CNN merely pandering to the stupid for commercial reasons — or deliberately avoiding the news? Have the networks run so far from serious reportage on domestic, economic and international affairs that they no longer know how to do anything but scandal?
Or — and here comes my conspiracy theory — is there something else afoot, and people are too catatonic to recognize it?

COSMOLOGY

Astronomers find first 'dark galaxy'

Astronomers have found the first "dark galaxy" - a black cloud of hydrogen gas and exotic particles, devoid of stars - two million light years from Earth.
This pretty much solves the problem of where all the dark matter is - hanging out in invisible clumps.
Joshua Simon, Timothy Robishaw and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, observed a cloud of hydrogen gas called HVC 127-41-330 using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
It appears to be rotating so fast it would fall apart unless it contains a strong, hidden source of gravity. The researchers therefore argue that the cloud must be at least 80 per cent dark matter, the hypothetical invisible substance whose gravity is supposed to explain why many objects in the cosmos move as fast as they do.

[The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle is a brilliant piece of science fiction written in the late 50's. Hoyle was a distinguished and controversial British astronomer, mathematician, popularizer of science, and novelist, who rejected the 'big bang' theory.]

SIMULACRA

Smiley face, left, and Hamlet's skull of Yorick

Are moths and butterflies becoming more like us?

Are moths and butterflies becoming more like us? Probably not, but these pictures of them sure do make you wonder.
A great collection of simulcra and other oddities of nature. For more on our friends in the lepidoptera kingdom, go here.

EARTH CHANGES

HAARP to play four times louder

Eham.net, the website for Ham Radio enthusiasts, is reporting that the controversial HAARP research facility in Alaska is set to quadruple in power over the next 3 years. Technical Specialist Richard Lampe said that "joint funding through DARPA will allow HAARP to quadruple in size from its current 960 kW output to 3.6 MW".
Ostensibly, the HAARP facility is simply aimed at studying the ionosphere. The HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) website outlines the function of the "research".
Some have charged that the HAARP facility is primarily a clandestine defense project, pursuing multiple goals. Chief among those is attempting to control weather patterns and natural phenomena such as earthquakes. Other alleged functions include blacking out communications networks as well as mind control.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

What would Lincoln say to Bush?

'I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.'

[Abraham Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864.]

COSMOLOGY NOW

Dark matter telescope, also handy for detecting those pesky asteroids

The possibility of repeatedly surveying large portions of the sky to unprecedented depth opens a range of opportunities, from detecting Earth-threatening asteroids to probing the nature of dark energy.

By combining a huge collecting area and a wide field of view the LSST telescope will be 20 times more powerful than any observatory now operating or under construction. The Large-aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope, often called the Dark Matter Telescope, is a proposed 8.4 meter, 7 square-degree field survey instrument which will have an effective aperture of 6.9 meters.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

US detonates 'Mother of all bombs' in Florida test

The most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal exploded in a huge, fiery cloud on a Florida test range on Friday after being dropped by an Air Force cargo plane in the last developmental step for the nearly 11-ton"mother of all bombs."
An MC-130E Combat Talon I dropped the 21,700-pound satellite-guided GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, over the test range at Eglin Air Force Base in northwestern Florida, said base spokesman Jake Swinson.
A plume of smoke rose more than 10,000 feet in the air and was visible 40 miles away in Pensacola, Florida.
"It looked like a big mushroom cloud filled with flames as it grew and grew and grew," Swinson said after the afternoon test. "It was one of the most awesome spectacles I've seen."

CLOAK AND DAGGER

David Kelly, the very secret service and the 'Rockingham cell'

David Kelly, giving evidence to the prime minister's intelligence and security committee in closed session on July 16 - the day before his suicide - made a comment the significance of which has so far been missed. He said: 'Within the defence intelligence services I liaise with the Rockingham cell.' Unfortunately nobody on the committee followed up this lead, which is a pity because the Rockingham reference may turn out to be very important indeed.
Chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, distinguished himself in insisting before the Iraq war, and was almost alone in doing so, that almost all of Iraq's WMD had been destroyed as a result of inspections, and the rest either used or destroyed in the first Gulf war. In terms, therefore, of proven accuracy of judgment and weight of experience of the workings of western military intelligence, he is a highly reliable source.
In an interview in the Scottish Sunday Herald in June, Ritter said: "Operation Rockingham [a unit set up by defence intelligence staff within the MoD in 1991] cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard data, but had a preordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD...

NEW WORLD ORDER

Gen. Tommy Franks moots Martial Law in the US

General Tommy Franks, who led U.S. forces in Iraq, says that an attack on U.S. soil with a weapon of mass destruction that causes large casualties will be likely to lead to an end to the U.S. Constitution in favor of a military-run government.
Franks says, "It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty- producing event somewhere in the Western world -- it may be in the United States of America -- that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty- producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important… [then] the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."

[Foundations are in place for martial law in the US. From July 27, 2002.
Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.
See also Continuity of Government Commission
The commission is an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Brookings Institution project headquartered at AEI. It is funded by the Carnegie, Hewlett, Packard, and MacArthur foundations. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford are the honorary co-chairs of the commission and Lloyd Cutler and Alan Simpson are the chairmen. The commission includes members who have served in government at the highest levels.]

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Bush admits Iraq is a new front in endless war


Pledging no hasty withdrawal of American forces, Bush said, "We fully recognize that Iraq has become a new front in the war on terror" when he met with five Iraqi women recently.
Of course this is at odds with his previous stance that Iraq already was a major front in the war on terror....
During the media moment, he also blurted that 'they'll kill innocent people anywhere, anytime,' he said. 'That's just the way they are. They have no regard for human life.' However it is unclear whether he was referring to Al Queda or US forces.

DUBYA'S UK BUBBLE

Buzzflash.com

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Hold on to your humanity

An open letter to GIs in Iraq:
When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
...
My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.
So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Mossad target of Kirkouk bombing

A huge blast has caused extensive damage in a Mossad office building in Kirkouk in northern Iraq late on Monday killing and wounding an unspecified number of Mossad agents and civilian Kurds, the Middle East News Agency said yesterday.
US troops and rescue workers were rushed into the devastated building to remove the bodies and take the wounded to a hospital in Mousel, MENA said. The workers have arrived at the site during the night to remove the debris and evacuate the injured persons, the news agency added.
US troops prevented the people from getting closer to the building and imposed a news black out on the cause of the explosion, which occurred in the garage of the building, it said.

LOOKING UP

OWL Astronomy's next big thing

The OWL (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is an awesome project which requires international effort to make it happen. If constructed, this huge telescope - with a main mirror more than 100 metres across - would have a predicted resolution 40 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater.
It would be sited – probably in Chile - at an altitude of 5000 metres and would be operated almost as a space observatory, with a base camp for the human operators nearby at a lower height of no more than 3000 metres.

EARTH CHANGES

US firm makes 'weather control powder'

A company in the United States claims it has invented a powder that can be used to remove clouds from the sky and even stop the development of hurricanes.
They say the new product could help many areas of the world that are subject to extreme weather conditions.
The Florida based company, Dyn-o-mat, used a military aircraft to drop four tonnes of its powder on to a developing storm cloud.
The cloud disappeared from radar screens, which were monitoring the experiment.
Officials from the company, which produces materials to absorb pollutants such as oil and acids, say they used a specially developed powder that absorbs large quantities of water.

BLOOD AND GORE

Vidal pops a verbal cap in Bush's ass

It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.
On the war in Iraq, Vidal says: "I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.
Nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed."

RISE OF THE MACHINES

Email stress: are we expecting too much?

A survey by the Australian Psychological Society has found that about 70 per cent of managers were stressed by the number of emails they received and the speed at which they were expected to deal with them. Researcher, Dr Amanda Gordon, was not surprised by the results and says they match a growing body of anecdotal evidence.
Survey respondents said "they were receiving between about 20 to 50 emails a day with which they had to deal, that email has become the prime form of communication both within organisations and between organisations, that there seemed to be an extra workload created by the ease with which you can actually make requests of someone through email".

FAMILY TREE

What did we do to wipe out Neanderthals?

Why did the Neanderthals die out? This is one of the biggest mysteries of human evolution.
These were people who flourished in Europe and the Near East for more than 100,000 years, yet vanished from their last stronghold in Europe about 30,000 years ago — at roughly the same time that modern humans arrived.

COSMIC WIERDNESS

'Preposterous universe' still perplexes experts

One major sign of the universe's messiness is its makeup. The list of its ingredients turns out to be a recipe for disaster. Only about 3 percent of the total mass-energy mixture is in the form of ordinary matter, the sort that planets and people and stars are made of. About 26 percent is some exotic sort of matter, a species not yet identified (and almost surely a species that has not yet been discovered). And the 70 percent remaining is even more mysterious – it's an unknown form of energy that took command of the universe a few billion years ago, forcing space to expand at an accelerating rate. Hence the disaster – the universe seems to be blowing itself up.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Gore denounces Bush administration's attack on civil liberties

Former US Vice President Al Gore accused President Bush on Sunday of failing to make the country safer after the Sept. 11 attacks and using the war against terrorism as a pretext to consolidate power.
'They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, 'big brother'-style government - toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book '1984' - than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America,' Gore charged.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

LEFT: Fearful women and children are bound by US soldiers. RIGHT: A child, about 6, watches nervously as she is handcuffed.

Shocking images of US soldiers tying up children

A series of shocking pictures revealing US soldiers tying up Iraqi women and children in their own home has provoked international outrage.
"This kind of image increases resentment of American troops in Iraq and can also play a major part in demoralising troops who are having to tie up small children. We are seeking to raise this issue further in the appropriate arena," said Washington CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper."
A spokesman for the London-based Islamic Observation Centre said the pictures showed a "complete disregard for the human rights of the Iraqi people". He added: "A normal human being should be repulsed by the very idea of tying up children. You have to question the mental state of soldiers who are being forced to do this."

EARTH CHANGES

Oceans in deep trouble

The oceans remain a mystery, but increasingly, the deep sea is coming under intense scrutiny. The US Congress would like to locate, size and claim untapped sources of fuel beneath the sea floor, their Department of Energy is exploring the potential for forestalling global warming by injecting captured carbon dioxide into the seabed or deep in ocean waters, and the US Navy is hoping to employ low frequency sonar throughout vast swaths of ocean to detect stealth submarines.
But for all the possibilities inherent in the poorly explored and understood deep seas, major risks and uncertainties lie in the ocean depths as well. The science surrounding these proposals for incursions into the sea is not fully developed. Aggressive efforts to exploit ocean resources threaten to alter, perhaps irrevocably, the finely-tuned chemical balances of the deep sea, with grave peril to animal and plant populations that dwell within it.

MIND AND BODY

Spot the fake smile

This experiment is designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one. It has 20 questions and should take you 10 minutes.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Arrested oil tycoon passed shares to banker

Control of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's shares in the Russian oil giant Yukos have passed to renowned banker Jacob Rothschild, under a deal they concluded prior to Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Sunday Times reported.
Voting rights to the shares passed to Mr. Rothschild, 67, under a "previously unknown arrangement" designed to take effect in the event that Mr. Khodorkovsky could no longer "act as a beneficiary" of the shares, it said.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, 40, whom Russian authorities arrested at gunpoint and jailed pending further investigation last week, was said by the Sunday Times to have made the arrangement with Mr. Rothschild when he realized he was facing arrest.
Mr. Rothschild -- the British head of one of Europe's most wealthy and influential families who runs his own investment empire -- now controls the voting rights on a stake in Yukos worth almost $13.5 billion, the newspaper said in a dispatch from Moscow.

GUN CRAZY

Double barreled double standards

For years, John Lott has provided a vital scholarly basis to the pro-gun movement. But now his research and his integrity are drawing heavy fire.
If economist John R. Lott didn't exist, pro-gun advocates would have had to invent him. Probably the most visible scholarly figure in the U.S. gun debate, Lott's densely statistical work has given an immense boost to the arguments of the National Rifle Association. Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime -- which extolled the virtues of firearms for self-defense and has sold some 100,000 copies in two editions, quite an accomplishment for an academic book -- has served as a Bible for proponents of "right to carry" laws (also known as "shall issue" laws), which make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. Were Lott to be discredited, an entire branch of pro-gun advocacy could lose its chief social scientific basis.

INHUMANE SACRIFICE

Australian government rushes to 'excise' islands from migration zone

The federal government yesterday excised the islands after a boat carrying 14 asylum seekers landed at Melville Island, near Darwin.
The regulations, which are deemed to have come into effect from midnight yesterday, mean the asylum seekers could be processed in a overseas detention centre, instead of in Australia.
The HMAS Geelong picked up the passengers, who claimed to be Turkish Kurds, and four crew from the Tiwi Islands, 75 kilometers orth of Darwin, the capital of Northern Territory province, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said. She said the boat was towed away and the government was mulling what to do with the asylum seekers. She would not say where they were being taken.
Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported the asylum seekers were being taken to the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, 1800 kilometers from the west Australian mainland. The island has an immigration detention center.
Senator Vanstone played down reports some of the asylum seekers may have set foot on Melville Island, which some legal experts believe may effect their legal status.

[Local Milikapiti community management council chairman Gibson Farmer said he and three other islanders had spoken to the asylum-seekers, who were of Middle Eastern appearance, after their boat ran aground. Immigration officers have ordered islanders not to speak to the media.]

CAMBODIAN MOMENT

Senator draws parallels between Iraq and Vietnam

"The most ridiculous thing on the TV last night was to hear the President say foreigners are in Iraq killing our soldiers. Can you imagine us, thousands of miles away, talking about foreigners killing our soldiers? Come on. What happened was, Iraq did not have terrorists at the time we went in. They tried to connect al-Qaida to Iraq, but now the President himself has acknowledged you couldn't connect al-Qaida. They didn't have nuclear capability."
These are the comments made to the house by South Carolina Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings.
"I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad....To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter day Arab hero...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. ...
"We now have more terrorism than less terrorism. That is the fact. We have the entire world turned against us. When we cannot get Mexico and Canada to go along with us, we are in trouble."

DATA SECURITY

Sensitive email backup tapes go AWOL

RUBBISH tips were searched by Telstra staff in a desperate attempt to recover classified government emails stored in a wheelie bin and accidentally dumped, a Senate committee has been told. ASIO, the Defence Signals Directorate and the Australian Federal Police remain on alert to establish whether encrypted data was reused.
The serious breach of security prompted Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Dr Peter Shergold to write to Telstra chief executive Ziggy Switkowski expressing 'extreme concern'.
Email back-up tapes from five government departments and agencies recording correspondence classified as protected were lost in the incident involving IT contractor, Telstra Enterprise Services. The Senate committee heard that Dr Shergold criticised the 'negligence of TES staff in the protection of this Commonwealth information'.

[Missing? Or intentionally destroyed?: Opposition Senator Kate Lundy said "The missing files are for the month of March 2003 — the month Australia committed troops to Iraq. This outrageous security blunder has exposed the Government's hypocrisy over security issues. Highly sensitive confidential emails have gone missing without adequate explanation, yet Telstra doesn't even get a slap on the wrist."]

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

Ashrawi delivers message of hope

Apart from some minor scuffles between a handful of Palestinian supporters and pro-Jewish students before the lecture, Palestinian advocate Dr Hanan Ashrawi had a captive audience of almost 600 people.
The activist of more than four decades received a standing ovation as she entered the room and she acknowledged a bouquet of flowers from the group, Jews Against the Occupation.
Hanan Ashrawi, whose 2003 Sydney Peace Prize drew so much hostility in advance, was received warmly in Sydney last night, in what she called "this luminous instant in history".
During her speech she said the protests against her receiving a peace prize were the result of petty hatred. Dr Ashrawi said she was surprised by the hate stirred in Sydney but that she had received more positive than negative responses to her prize win.
She opposed a simplistic view which divided the world into stereotypes of good and evil, urging instead diversity and collective responsibility under international law. She held out the promise that a just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict would unleash forces for good, democracy, regional integration and sustainable progress.

WAR RUMOURS

US warplanes overfly Scotland to ... ?

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the1980's as well as the first Gulf War.
It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the north pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.
Peacewatchers at USAF’s Fairford and Welford bases in the UK report that warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes at the weekend. As well as watching them from the ground the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio frequencies.

[There were some strong reactions against the claims made above with some claiming it is purely anti-American rhetoric. However other comments on the portland.indymedia.org website included the following:
"I live near a major US AFB. The sorties overhead are unbelievable. ( Unprecedented. I have lived here for 20+ years). They fly one after the other day & NIGHT, no matter how late at night it is. They are up to something." and
"This afternoon I visited a friend who has a 20's-something son in the U.S. Air Force. The son has a job that is obviously one calling for security clearances, and the father & son have a pre-arranged code that is rather simple as they are aware that the son's phone calls are likely monitored. According to my friend, he got the coded message that something BIG is indeed about to take place. Something really big, and he got no clue as to what it is, just that our government is taking a lot of massive effort to gear up for it." and
"My daughter works at the Pentagon and she e-mails me daily with short note from her office during her lunch break. Today's message had this: 'Mom, how is Aunt Bertha?...Is Aunt Bertha getting any better?...Please give Aunt Bertha a hug 'n' kiss for me next time you see her...I've always dearly loved Aunt Bertha!' Sounds like innocent ramblings to most I'm sure. However, Aunt Bertha died 12 years ago, and this is our little code that something nasty is about to take place. Whenever the name Aunt Bertha comes up, and depending on the number of times it's used, then I'm given advance warning that something is going to happen. Last time I got one with four mentions of Aunt Bertha is the Friday before 9-11. So guess we'd better get ready, cause the BIG BERTHA is coming."
So, it could be some bored jokesters posting these messages, or indeed some conintel pros, or they could be real warning signs. Signs that the Bush Reich is preparing to shore up flagging support with another Reichstag fire similar to 9/11.]

CANNON FODDER

Military draft always on the agenda in US

Some US citizens may labour onder the misapprehension that the draft is something to read about in history books.
The Selective Service System wants to hear from men and women in the community who might be willing to serve as members of a local draft board. If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service.
If a draft is authorized, a lottery based on birthdays determines the order in which registered men are called up by Selective Service.

[Conscientious objectors take note: Beliefs which qualify a registrant for CO status may be religious in nature, but don't have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical; however, a man's reasons for not wanting to participate in a war must not be based on politics, expediency, or self-interest. In general, the man's lifestyle prior to making his claim must reflect his current claims.]

MORAL DECAY

Race to save new victims of child porn

Computer file sharing has sent paedophile demand for real-time images soaring. But police can often only watch as children grow older and continue to be abused.
Detectives rely on two methods of tracing location: electronic footprints left by the user while online and forensic analysis of the images to find clues pointing to the country of origin, such as telephone books in the background or the style of furnishings. In some cases, often where the child is being held prisoner and abused in a completely blank room, there are not enough leads for police to chase. One case being investigated involves a prepubescent girl who is being held prisoner in a room and repeatedly abused. International law enforcement agencies know only that she is in the United States and the FBI is trying to pinpoint her exactlocation. New images of the child are shared through KaZaA and other services but police have been unable to find her.

[EU elite are filthy pigs, says Bossi: Italy's reform minister, Umberto Bossi said the European Union's elite are "filthy pigs" who wanted to "make paedophilia as easy as possible".]

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Space weather gone crazy: another historic flare

Just as solar scientists were ready to start breathing normally again, active region 10486 blasted off yet another mega-flare. This one saturated the X-ray detectors on the NOAA's GOES satellites; the jury is therefore out on the definitive classification of the flare, but from a subjective judgement of the data found on the NOAA SEC's space weather pages (and links therein, we estimate that it must have been well above 20.
This also happened once earlier in SOHO's history, on 4 April 2001. That flare was reclassified as an X20.
A very preliminary estimate based on just 3 images of the associated CME came out at about 2300 km/second. Although part of the CME is directed towards Earth, we will receive only a glancing blow, since the source region is right on the limb of the Sun as seen from Earth.

[See SOHO images. Recent stories: Solar flare hits Earth; light show in Perth and Massive solar flare may wreak havoc here.]

EARTH CHANGES

Mother Nature, the newest scapegoat, says Suzuki

As a result of tumultuous weather and geological events, thousands of people have been evacuated, hundreds have lost their homes, many have lost their jobs and a few have even lost their lives. So it's only natural for people to be looking for a scapegoat. Someone or something to point the finger at and say - you! It was your fault! Yet I was still quite taken aback when my local newspaper bizarrely chose to blame Mother Nature.
A lead editorial in the Vancouver Sun likens Mother Nature to Mommy Dearest, claims that 'our culture has a history of viewing nature as benign, as the wellspring from which all good things come,' and argues that 'it's time to relieve ourselves of the notion that everything natural is good.'
The intent of the editorial, it seems, is to remove any hint of human culpability from the disasters that have gripped the province. Never mind that the extreme weather events and insect infestations British Columbia has been experiencing are exactly what scientists have been telling us for years are the kind of thing we will be seeing more and more of if we don't stop pumping increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Instead, the editorial seeks to frame the world as "nature vs humans" as though the two entities are fundamentally different and at odds. In such a world, whatever people do to shore up their defenses against the dangers of nature could be seen as justifiable.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Flag blunder embarrasses Pentagon

The US embassy in Bucharest had to apologise to the president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, for the Pentagon decorating his table with a Russian flag when he lunched with US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this week.
Romania's influential Evenimentul Zilei newspaper poked fun at the mistake. Alongside a photograph of the lunch, clearly showing Russian and US flags intertwined in the space between Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Iliescu, ran the headline "Memories are coming back to haunt me", the Associated Press reported.

[Yesterday Mr Rumsfeld answered a question from a journalist on warlords in Afghanistan by talking about Kurdish peshmerga fighters in Iraq until it was pointed out that that was a different country. "Oh, I'm sorry ... I was thinking of Iraq. No wonder I couldn't understand it," he explained.]

STATE BARBARISM

Sudanese boy faces double amputation after 'unfair' robbery trial

A Sudanese boy of 16 is to have his right hand and left foot amputated by a court order that human rights campaigners have denounced as barbaric.
Launching an urgent appeal on behalf of Mohamed Hassan Hamdan, Amnesty International said yesterday that the penalty, known as 'cross amputation' is tantamount to torture.

BLOOD SPORT

'Rich killers' stalk City of Lost Girls

Ciudad Juarez is known as 'the city of the dead girls'. In 10 years almost 400 women have been murdered in this city on the border between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and the killings continue. Now a courageous Mexican-American journalist is alleging a group of six businessmen is behind the slaughter. Described as 'untouchables', their wealth puts them above the law. Their motive is said to be blood sport.
The rise of the cartel coincided with the feminicido, the female murders. The first victim was Angelica Luna Villalobos; her body was dumped in the Alta Vista neighbourhood in 1993.
Since then, 370 women have been killed. Some deaths may be attributed to domestic violence or random crime. But more than a third of the women were raped before death. Most victims are tortured and mutilated. Sometimes the killer leaves a signature; a breast or a nipple is sliced off. The bodies are then dumped in wasteland.
The average age of the victims is 16; all were poor. Their deaths, says Amnesty International, 'have no political cost to the authorities'. Many suspects are in custody, but the killings go on.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Flak again fired at Enola Gay, WWII exhibit

When Smithsonian Institution officials unveiled a home for the World War II bomber Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had plagued efforts to exhibit the airplane that carried the first atomic bomb.
Scholars, writers and activists have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling Enola Gay as 'the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time' without mentioning that it dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
'You wouldn't display a slave ship solely as a model of technological advancement,' said David Nasaw, a cultural historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center and one of 100 petition signers. 'It would be offensive not to put it in context.'

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the US was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of September 11 announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. The attack on Hiroshima paved the way for September 11 and its aftermath.

[Previous story: Hiroshima bomber goes on show, without pesky "human' details..]

TRUTH NO DEFENCE

Man remanded on bail for US embassy slight

Bruce Hubbard has been remanded on bail for allegedly offending the United States Embassy. Hubbard appeared in the North Shore District Court today charged with misusing a telephone. Hubbard allegedly offended a US Embassy worker, Tessa Brown, by suggesting in an email that the United States had napalmed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the United States had invaded 72 countries since the end of WWII, and that there were similarities between the current US Bush Administration and Nazi Germany.
The Embassy subsequently made a complaint to the New Zealand Police, an investigation was initiated resulting in Hubbard’s arrest Thursday.

['The arrest of Auckland Peace activist Bruce Hubbard for sending an email to the United States Embassy is a chilling reminder that freedom of speech is being attacked by the new Counter-terrorism legislation. The email was in protest of the illegal invasion of Iraq' said Peace Action Wellington member Valerie Morse.]

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Thousands riot in China after vendor killed by government officials

Thousands of people in east China's Shandong province rioted last week, storming a government building and smashing equipment after an official vehicle ran over and killed a vendor, a human rights group and residents said.
The riot -- one of the largest in recent years -- occurred a day after a confrontation between officials and a man selling fresh pancakes from a roving stove-wagon in Zhoucheng city.
The previous day, the vendor was selling the popular egg and onion pancakes when some employees from the "city management" department confiscated his wagon and loaded it onto their vehicle, sources said. Shao -- seeing his source of livelihood being carted away -- blocked the vehicle's path. He was run over as a crowd watched, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

EUROPEAN OVERDOSE

A tide of heroin floods through Tajikistan to the West

Hampered by poor resources, border guards in the impoverished former Soviet state of Tajikistan are losing the battle to stem the tide as heroin from Afghanistan pours through Central Asia on its way to Britain. More than 90 per cent of heroin sold in Britain comes from Afghanistan, according to the UN. Heroin is pouring through Tajikistan, the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, because anti-terrorism operations in southern Afghanistan make it difficult for smugglers to cross into Pakistan and Iran.
Drug control forces seized 4.4 tons of heroin - more than double their haul for the same period last year - but it is just one tenth of the total amount being smuggled, law enforcement officials believe.
Cultivation of opium poppies, the raw material for heroin, was banned in Afghanistan by the Taliban, but production has rocketed since the regime was driven from power.

SECRET WEAPON

‘Something’ felled an M1A1 Abrams tank in Iraq – but what?

Shortly before dawn on Aug. 28, an M1A1 Abrams tank on routine patrol in Baghdad “was hit by something” that crippled the 69-ton behemoth. Army officials still are puzzling over what that “something” was.
According to an unclassified Army report, the mystery projectile punched through the vehicle’s skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the hull. The hole was so small that “my little finger will not go into it,” the report’s author noted.
The “something” continued into the crew compartment, where it passed through the gunner’s seatback, grazed the kidney area of the gunner’s flak jacket and finally came to rest after boring a hole 1½ to 2 inches deep in the hull on the far side of the tank. As it passed through the interior, it hit enough critical components to knock the tank out of action.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

The bigger the crisis, the bigger the lies

In his opening remarks Bush presented a view of events ludicrously at odds with reality. Citing America’s “continuing work in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the president declared: “The world is safer today because Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are gone.” This under conditions of a growing guerrilla war in Afghanistan and the single most bloody day of anti-US violence in Baghdad since the beginning of the American occupation.

[The contrast between rhetoric and reality reached new heights at the press conference held by President Bush October 28. It was Bush's first news conference since July 30 and only the second since early March, several weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq. ]