VAMPIRES LIVE

Chupacabra ('Goatsucker') seen in Central Russia

Reports of a beast that kills animals and sucks on their blood came from a village in Central Russia, when a farm had 32 turkeys killed overnight. The beast left the corpses bloodless, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said.
Then reports came from neighboring villages, where more than 30 sheep and goats fell victim to the vampire. Again, the blood had been drained from corpses but the flesh remained intact. All the slaughtered animals had similar puncture wounds on their necks, different from the marks that wolves, dogs or lynx leave on their victims.

Finally, eyewitness descriptions match the traditional description of the Chupacabra, said to resemble a kangaroo and a dog with huge teeth.
“I heard the sheep bleating loudly, and when I approached the barn I saw a black shadow, like a big dog standing on its hind legs. It leaped like a kangaroo — when it spotted me it ran away,” says Yerbulat Isbasov, 18, who guards sheep in the village of Gavrilovka.
Yerbulat saw the beast again in a few days’ time, and described it as a 1.2 metre high animal with a hump on its back.

[Another witness Alfia Makasheva reported seeing a whole pack in her yard: “One was a huge reddish thing, another was dark grey, and they were being followed by a pack of pups. In the middle of the yard the red one turned its head and got up on the hind legs, as if it was thinking.”]

LAUGH IT UP

President Bush Discusses Global War on Terror

Q Thank you, Mr. President. It's an honor to have you here. I'm a first-year student in South Asia studies. My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.

THE PRESIDENT: I was going to ask him. Go ahead. (Laughter.) Help. (Laughter.)

Q I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. (Laughter.) Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less against -- over our American military contractors. I would submit to you that in this case, this is one case that privatization is not a solution. And, Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn't kidding -- (laughter.) I was going to -- I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I've got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation -- I don't mean to be dodging the question, although it's kind of convenient in this case, but never -- (laughter.) I really will -- I'm going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That's how I work. I'm -- thanks. (Laughter.)

FIRST CASUALTY

Truth is the first casualty of war

Australian prime minister John Howard has rejected claims by Private Jake Kovco's mother that the army and the government had covered up over the circumstances surrounding his death.
"I can give her an assurance that there will be no cover up," Mr Howard said.
The government initially said Pte Kovco died when his gun discharged as he was cleaning it.
It has since said the soldier was not cleaning the weapon when it accidentally discharged, but the details of exactly what happened remain unclear.

LIVING DEAD

OUR NOBLE LEADERS

Donald Rumsfeld, left, and President George W. Bush

Bush's wisdom: 'God told me to say dumb stuff"

"I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense."
George W. Bush, Washington, D.C. April 18, 2006 (Watch video clip.) +more

The analogy between Iraq and Vietnam has proved to be most compelling to the generals who planned and conducted the invasion of Iraq. They kept to themselves their profound disquiet about the rapid rejection of the original plan for invasion that had taken 10 years to develop, the inadequate downsized force, the absence of preparation for the occupation, and the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military.

[Clinging to Rumsfeld as generals lead an unprecedented revolt, Bush reveals his weakness and his disdain for the lessons of history.]

HE'S ALL STYLE

George W Bush was unwilling to let Hu bow out gracefully and insisted on more photos - dragging him unceremoniously back onto the dias by the sleeve of his jacket.

Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the US this month and was treated to a new kind of hospitality.
The Chinese National Anthem was announced as that of "the Republic of China", another name for Taiwan, the island that rebelled and seceded from mainland China and has since sought US aid in keeping Hu Jintao from grabbing it back.

... but why does the Pope support Bush?

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.

SWINGING THE LEAD

Order from chaos

The “pendulums” in a scientific simulation were loosely connected to each other, as oscillators also are in many natural situations.
A textbook example of such “coupled” oscillators is pendulums with springs linking their ends together.
The scientists found that the pendulums, when pushed by forces according to a regular rhythm, behaved chaotically and swung out of sync.
Yet when the researchers introduced disorder -- applying forces at random intervals to each oscillator -- they began to swing in synch. The “forces” were applied along the rods of the “pendulums” to make them swing. 
“When you introduce disorder … the chaos that was present before disappears and there is order,” said Sebastian F. Brandt, a physics graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the study. The findings appeared in the January issue of the research journal Physical Review Letters. 

[Other common cases are violin strings, which are connected by their sounding boards, and electrical filters used in communications.]

TINFOIL HAT

Babs ... nutter

Clothing for the paranoid

TINFOIL hats may protect the brain from dangerous radio frequencies and mind-control rays. Or they may not, according to a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tested three standard designs with equipment costing $250,000.
They found the foil actually amplified some radio signals - especially those on frequencies used by the US government - by a factor of up to 100. In summing up, they say:
"It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission].
"We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings."

[Of course the real problem with the classic tinfoil hat is that wearing one makes you look like a nut.]

OUR COSMOS

Another fundamental constant accused of changing


Cosmologists claim to have found evidence that yet another fundamental constant of nature, called mu, may have changed over the last 12 billion years. If confirmed, the result could force some physicists to radically rethink their theories. It would also provide support for string theory, which predicts extra spatial dimensions.

This is not the first time fundamental constants have been accused of changing over the lifetime of the universe. Most famously, there was controversy over the fine structure constant, alpha (?), which governs how light and electrons interact. Some physicists claimed it is changing while others said it was not (see Speed of light may have changed recently).

OUR NOBLE LEADERS

Cheney Gets Booed, Sheen Gets Applauded:
But the media reports it the opposite way around

Cheney threw the first pitch at a Washington Nationals baseball game.
Cheney was clearly booed by at least 80% of the attending fans at the RFK Memorial Stadium, yet the media reported a mixed reaction and the Washington Post went as far as to outright lie and claim the boos were a result of the bad pitch that bounced before the Nationals' Brian Schneider caught it, when in reality the cat-calls began as soon as Cheney's name was announced. The boos raged even though Cheney was accompanied by three injured US servicemen who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.


[Watch the video]

SEX EN LAÏCITÉ

Separation of Church and State

Laïcité is a prevailing conception of the separation of church and state and the absence of religious interference into government affairs (and vice versa). It implies free exercise of religion, but no special status for religion: religious activities should submit to the same set of laws as other activities and are not considered above the law. The government refrains from taking positions on religious doctrine and only considers religious subjects from their practical consequences on the inhabitants' lives.

The Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network) is an international non-profit organisation, based in Paris with offices in London and Lima, which states it aims at promoting liberty and laïcité (separation of church and state).

[The Voltaire Network was founded in the context of a campaign in favour of freedom of speech, which the founders thought was put into jeopardy by new laws enshrined in the French penal code.
After the campaign the association lived on, specialising in the study of far-right movements and religions.
It was vocal notably in preventing the French government from funding the religious part of the Pope's visit to France, and in initiating an investigation of the French Parliament regarding the French far-right militia group DPS. Since 1999, the Réseau Voltaire has dealt with international issues, notably by publishing daily news about the bombings of Serbia by NATO.]

GLOBAL WARMING

WAR MONGERELS

The really real "long war"


Savvy players in the military-industrial racket know that the "War on Terror" is just short-end money: fat and sweet, sure, but it doesn't really have legs.
"Islamofacism" is too empty a concept to sustain the kind of decades-long looting of the public treasury that the dear old Cold War used to provide – the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world just aren't interested in dressing up in Nazi drag and playing their assigned roles in the Pentagon-Neocon-Theocon war game.
I mean, Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, you can even walk your army right into the heartland of Islam and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and they still won't take the bait. Not a single Muslim nation has gone jihad over Iraq; they haven't all turned into a nice, big monolithic evil empire set on the utter destruction of America.
It's like they're all just ordinary people or something, good, bad and indifferent, largely occupied with their own concerns – personal, economic, social, religious, national.

BODY OF EVIDENCE

China selling prisoners' organs: report

A group of top British surgeons has accused China of unethically harvesting the bodies of executed convicts for transplant organs that are then sold to the highest bidder, according to a media report.
British Transplantation Society chairman Stephen Wigmore says there is growing evidence that convicts were being selected for execution to suit the needs of paying organ recipients, a report on the BBC website says.
Dr Wigmore is also reported as saying that thousands of organs are being collected without donors' prior consent.

[A huge lucrative black market for human organs has emerged in China as a result of a chronic shortage of donors.]

EASTER NEOCONS

Ancient text claims Judas was no traitor ...

An ancient manuscript dating from the third or fourth century, containing the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, has been conserved, authenticated and translated after being lost for nearly 1,700 years, scientists say.
In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus selects Judas from among the other disciples for a special task: “... you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Jesus would thus have been asking Judas to help him get rid of his physical flesh, to free the spiritual being within.

[Scholars said the 66-page manuscript contains not only the Gospel of Judas but also a text titled James, also known as First Apocalypse of James, a Letter of Peter to Philip, and a fragment of a fourth text provisionally called the Book of Allogenes.]

... and Satan isn't such a bad guy, either

According to Dr. Henry Ansgar Kelly's "Satan: A Biography", the Evil One feared by Christians is just an invention of the Roman church.
Satan is the same sort of celestial functionary we see in the Book of Job - appointed to govern the world, specifically to monitor and test human beings. A bit like an Attorney General.
And like some Attorneys General he is brutal and deceitful in his methods, and Jesus predicts that his rule will soon come to an end.
"Lucifer" -- Latin for "light bringer," or Venus the morning star -- is the result of a sloppy 4th Century Latin translation of a story about an Iraqi king. The whole tale of Lucifer being a beloved angel of God who does something bad and "falls" to Earth was entirely invented centuries later, supposedly from a verse in Isaiah about a plain old king being taunted by exiled Jews.

[IN OTHER NEWS: A new study suggests Jesus was strolling on a patch of floating ice, not walking on water.Yeah, right. That is even less believeable than the original story.]

EARTH CHANGES

Global warming yields “glacial earthquakes,” future sea level rise

In new studies, scientists report that global warming may be responsible for a newfound and growing phenomenon, “glacial earthquakes".
Three studies published in the March 24 issue of the research journal Science warn of the events.

Two studies found that the Earth may be warm enough by 2100 for widespread melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and partial collapse of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
In a third study, seismologists reported an unexpected offshoot of global warming: “glacial earthquakes,” in which island-sized glaciers lurch unexpectedly. Glaciers are normally slow-moving masses of ice.
The lurches yield temblors up to magnitude 5.1 on the moment-magnitude scale, which is similar to the Richter scale, the researchers said.
 
[Glacial earthquakes in Greenland, they added, are most common in July and August, and have more than doubled in number since 2002.]

SEPARATION OF POWERS

Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship

Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.
In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.

[After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, removed from life support, Texan Republican Bushite Tom DeLay said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour."
Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president".]

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Witness coaching puts Moussaoui sentencing in doubt

Judge Brinkema said in all her years on the bench she had "never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses".
A government lawyer emailed the prosecution's opening statement, and a commentary on an FBI government witness, to officials scheduled to appear.
Judge Brinkema said the rule against witnesses hearing testimony in advance is "a very important protection of the truth-seeking process".

[FLASHBACK: May 13, 2004: Beheaded American had links to Moussaoui
When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father.
Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him.
Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.]

WHODUNNIT

Witness Ties Moussaoui To 'Dream' Terror Plot

VIDEO SHOWN TO JURORS: Zacarias Moussaoui stroked his beard. He scratched his chin. Finally, he asked the question that everyone in the federal courtroom yesterday had waited much of the day to hear.
"You said you met someone by the name of John, correct?" Moussaoui asked the witness.
Although Moussaoui never attended law school, he demonstrated in the videotape that he knew how to object, which he did repeatedly, often on the grounds that the question being asked lacked the proper foundation.

The witness Bafana said he was treasurer of a chapter of Jemaah Islamiya in Singapore. He said he helped raise money for terrorist attacks -- including one on a train station in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 people -- and served as a host for visitors, such as John, when they stopped in Malaysia.

["That is not Zacary," said Moussaoui's mother Aicha el-Wafi, 59, speaking in French during a break in her son's sentencing trial on Tuesday. "He is too calm. He doesn't even budge."]

TRUTH IN FICTION

Kurt Vonnegut tells it like it is

“We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries,” says Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “They run everything. We have no Democratic Party. It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans. So we have no representatives in Washington. Working people have no leverage whatsoever. 
“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil. “Bush used that line recently,” Vonnegut adds. “I should sue him for plagiarism.” 
Things have gotten so bad, he says, “people are in revolt again life itself.” 
Our economy has been making money, but “all the money that should have gone into research and development has gone into executive compensation. If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one. "

[“As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments. The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night."]

WAR ON EVERYONE

Walt Cronkite tells it like it is

Nicole Richardson was 18-years-old when her boyfriend, Jeff, sold nine grams of LSD to undercover federal agents. She had nothing to do with the sale. There was no reason to believe she was involved in drug dealing in any way.
But then an agent posing as another dealer called and asked to speak with Jeff. Nicole replied that he wasn't home, but gave the man a number where she thought Jeff could be reached.
An innocent gesture? It sounds that way to me. But to federal prosecutors, simply giving out a phone number made Nicole Richardson part of a drug dealing conspiracy. Under draconian mandatory minimum sentences, she was sent to federal prison for ten years without possibility of parole.
To pile irony on top of injustice, her boyfriend - who actually knew something about dealing drugs - was able to trade information for a reduced sentence of five years. Precisely because she knew nothing, Nicole had nothing with which to barter.

FOR THE RECORD

This is what the original Jyllands-Posten page looked like. Notice that there were only 12 cartoons.

In the wake of the deaths: the Jyllands-Posten cartoons

Prohibitions on the depiction of Islam's prophet Mohammed (PBUH) have not always been observed. The Mohammed Image Archive is a compendium of images that depict the 7th-century founder of the faith spanning all historical periods, cultures and genres.

[NB This site contains many beautiful historic artworks but also images which may offend.]

The entire controversy started when Danish author Kåre Bluitgen complained that he could not find an artist brave enought to illustrate his upcoming book about Mohammed. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten issued a call for submissions from any artists willing to take up the challenge.
In the ensuing brouhaha, the original book was almost forgotten; it has now been released, and does feature page after page of Mohammed depictions. This site features scans of several of the pages. One image, taken from the book (titled Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv, or The Koran and the life of the prophet Mohammed), apparently shows Mohammed with his child-bride Aisha.

BIG BROTHER

Pay a credit card debt, expect Homeland Security to investigate

A retired couple paid the $6,522 balance on their credit card. An alarm went off. A red flag went up. Their behavior was found questionable.
They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs. But they did learn how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified.

[Adding injury to insult, the money doesn't come off the balance until the threat alert is lifted.]

HISTORY CHANNEL

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is a comedian who provides more accurate and cutting edge journalism than most of the major news networks.
Surveys show that an astonishing number of young people claim they get most of their news from watching The Daily Show.

[In 2003, when news anchor Bill Moyers interviewed Stewart for the PBS program NOW, he introduced his guest this way: “When future historians come to write the political story of our times, they will first have to review hundreds of hours of a cable television program called The Daily Show. You simply can’t understand American politics in the new millennium without The Daily Show.”]

OUR GREAT LEADERS

Video shows Bush Katrina warning

Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans' flood defences could be overcome.
The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, also shows Mr Bush being told of the risk to evacuees in the Superdome.

TRY OR RELEASE

Many innocents, few released

"Two FBI agents began the questioning, convinced I was involved in some nefarious web of plots, from planning to assassinate the Pope to masterminding al-Qaeda's finance operation in Europe, or being an instructor in one of its Afghan training camps. They had their perceptions about me and were searching for ways to confirm them -- preferably from my own mouth. By now I'd been raised to the status of some rogue James Bond-type figure. They thought I was a graduate from some prestigious British university, that I was fluent in a dozen languages, that I was an expert in computers and several martial arts… Had it not been for this ludicrous situation I'm in, I would have been flattered. I once said to them, 'I should ask you to write my résumé -- I'd find a job anywhere.'"

[A British citizen of Pakistani heritage who was held and tortured at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray for years in solitary confinement before being released when it became obvious he was 'the wrong guy'.]

BANKRUPT WORLD

Global crisis just around the corner

The end of the publication by the American Federal Reserve of the M3 monetary aggregate (and that of other components) will destroy transparency on the US dollars in circulation worldwide.
The decision has been vehemently criticized by economists and financial analysts,

[Monetary aggregates (M1, M2, M3, M4) are statistical economic indicators. M0 is the value of all currency - here the dollar - that exists in actual bank notes and coins. M1 is M0 + checking accounts of this currency. M2 is M1 + money market accounts and Certificates of Deposits (CD) under $100,000. M3 is M2 + all larger holdings in the dollar (Eurodollar reserves, larger instruments and most non-European nations' reserve holdings) of $100,000 and more. The key point here is that when the Fed stops reporting M3, the entire world will lose transparency on the value of reserve holdings in dollars by other nations and major financial institutions.
Speech at National Economists Club, Washington DC, November 21, 2002.]

DEMOCRACY THREAT

No paper trail

Pencil and paper voting still the safest

Diebold AccuVote TS electronic voting machines have an infrared (IrDA) port installed. This is a remote communication port through which another remote device could communicate with the touch screen and change either its data or its software or both.
If your county uses Diebold touch screens, let your county officials and election judges know that it is crucial to cover the IR port with opaque tape.

[Dibold makes many of the ATM machines used in Australia. They all provide a paper receipt, why do their voting machines not produce a similar receipt of their vote.]

SCHRODINGER'S PC

From a New York Times science writer, the first book on what will be the next big breakthrough in cyberworld: the development of a quantum computer. (Bookshop)

Quantum computer works best switched off

Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.
The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".

[Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign send a photon into a system of mirrors and other optical devices, which included a set of components that run a simple database search by changing the properties of the photon. The system uses a quantum trick called the Zeno effect.]

BEAUTIFUL MIND

Victims of War Are Not To Be Seen Or Heard Or Mentioned

On March 18, 2003, two days before her son launched the invasion of Iraq, Barbara Bush appeared on Good Morning America. Our nation's "First Mother" asked Diane Sawyer, "Why should we hear about body bags and death and how many? . . . Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that."

[Joseph Bonham was an American soldier. He lost both of his arms and legs and all of his face to an artillery shell. He could not see or hear or speak. Other than that he was healthy and lucid. That was Joe's nightmare. He could be kept alive a long time...]

SPIN CYCLE

Fox News talking head takes in new factor

Bill O'Reilly suggested that the United States "hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible" because "[t]here are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."
O'Reilly has previously called those advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq "pinheads" and compared them to Hitler appeasers.

[Audio clip here.]

WHAT I SAY, NOT WHAT I DO

Hipocrisy rules in the US Government

Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he's doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic.
President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage.
The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn't. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned.
The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, "he's smoking Dutch Cleanser."
The president doesn't know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids.
The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn't, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme.

WOBBLY SCIENCE?

The Earth’s Wobble Has Paused

For at least three and a half weeks there has been almost no movement of the spin axis in the normal spiral track of Chandler’s Wobble.
For the past 21 days there has been no discernable wobble motion in the Earth.  Have we come to a profound change in the geophysics of the Earth?  Why this sudden change in what usually has been for the past 100 years or more a fairly regular, fairly predictable wobble track.

As is well known, the wobble is generated by the differential pulling of the Moon and the Sun on the Earth's equatorial bulge (and any other concentrations of mass in or on the Earth).  This differential pulling is caused by the oblique angles of the orbital planes which bring the Sun and the Moon alternatively above and below the equator, thus tending through orbital time to push one side of the Earth or the other to move faster or slower than the other side to the North or to the South.
The Earth's Wobble has a 7 year cycle which produces two extremes, a small spiraling wobble circle and a large spiraling wobble circle, about 3.5 years apart.  The Earth was  in October 2005 moving into the small spiraling circle (the MIN phase of the wobble), which should have slowly unfolded during 2006 and the first few months of 2007.  (Each spiraling circle takes about 14 months).
But suddenly at the beginning of November 2005,  the track of the location of the spin axis veered at a very sharp right angle to its circling motion.  The track of the spin axis began to slow down and by about January 8, 2006, it ceased nearly all relative motion on the x and y coordinates which are used to define the daily changing location of the spin axis.

[Article found in discussion forum here.]

THROWING MUD

DuPont rejects Teflon health risk claims

DuPont says: Teflon® is a brand name and a registered trademark of DuPont. Teflon® is not PFOA. The improper use of the Teflon® brand as a synonym for PFOA is not only inaccurate and misleading to consumers but also constitutes a trademark violation. More +

However: Independent Science Panel to EPA: Teflon Chemical is 'Likely' Human Carcinogen

A panel comprised mostly of independent scientists advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found today that DuPont's Teflon chemical, PFOA, is a "likely human carcinogen."
The company could face the maximum fine from EPA of $314 million for illegally suppressing birth defect and safety studies. Agency officials, however, have hinted that they are considering a much lower fine of $13 million.
DuPont is also the subject of a federal criminal probe into its suppression of the studies.
"Scientists independent of chemical industry money looked at the toxicity of this chemical, and the verdict is clear: This Teflon chemical should be considered a likely human carcinogen. If EPA officials needed a reason to level the maximum fine against this $24.6 billion company, they have it now," said EWG Senior Vice President Richard Wiles. "DuPont might be politically connected with an army of lobbyists, but it should still be held accountable."

[]

WORKING FOR THE MAN

Imported labour driving down Australian pay and conditions

'Imported' Indonesian workers have allegedly been paid as little as $40 a day to dig ditches in the South Australian desert.
Drilling company Halliburton Australia employed a team of Indonesians for labouring jobs at its gas extraction operations in the Cooper Basin late last year.
Australians who worked alongside the Indonesians said the imported staff worked 80 days straight, were housed in poor work camp accommodation and had some meals laced with pork so they were unfit for the Muslim employees to eat.
Halliburton last week confirmed the global company employs imported workers.

[Despite three days of requests to Halliburton in Australia and the U.S., they have not answered the claims.]

PLOUGHSHARES INTO SWORDS

Things change … Middleback Station owner Andrew Nicolson is resigned to the army's acquisition of the land his family has worked since 1919.

South Australian sheep stations swallowed up by Australian Army

Station owners have met the army's land acquisition proposal with mixed reactions.

Middleback Station owner Andrew Nicolson said the decision has been made, things change and life goes on.
"It's a decision you wouldn't have arrived at yourself," he said. "At the end of the day the decision is not ours.
"The army will make the decision and life goes on."
Although Andrew was unsure how much of Middleback Station the army wanted, he thought it was about 80 per cent.
"At this stage they would take the whole lot," Andrew said. "It would leave us with something unviable."
The Nicolson family has owned Middleback Station since 1919 and Andrew has run it since 1988.
"Of course it's sad to see it go," he said. "I have loved the farming and the family's loved it."

Andrew said the acquisition would provide another use for the land.
Because of its hardy ecology, the land was well suited to the army's heavy vehicle and troop training activities.
Having such a large area of land would allow areas to recover and regenerate between training sessions.

Cultana to triple in size

The Cultana defence training area could triple in size within the next five years, according to parliamentary secretary for defence Teresa Gambaro.
The Defence Minister has approved land acquisitions between the existing training area and Iron Knob.
This land, in addition to the current 48,000 hectares, would make Cultana one of Australia's largest military training areas.
Just how much land was acquired would depend on negotiations with leaseholders of nearby stations. However, the defence department proposed to acquire all of Tregalana Station and all or part of Roopena and Katunga stations.

The stations surrounding Whyalla have significant historical value for Whyalla and its residents and this would have to be safeguarded if the expansion went ahead.

NOT FUNNY

New Evidence Suggests Cartoon Riots Are Staged Psyop

More evidence has come to light that confirms fake and misleading caricatures were bundled in with the more tame cartoons that were printed in Danish newspapers. Muslims were misled into believing that all the images were printed in newspapers when they were not.

REDS UNDER THE BED

The Man Who Terrorized America For Five Years

The film Good Night and Good Luck contains many striking performances - by George Clooney, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jnr and especially the lean-faced, perma-smoking David Strathairn as crusading TV news anchor Ed Murrow.
But one performance doesn't quite fit with the others. It's simply a face, mouthing lazy threats from a TV screen, but what a face - a boxer's mug, hostile and pugnacious, the eyes deep-set and hooded, a witch's peak of hair arrowing across a pasty brow.

The performance failed to impress some of the preview "test" audiences. They thought the actor was, they said, overacting. What they didn't realise was, this was real. They'd been looking at a real-life broadcast, taken from archive footage, by Senator Joe McCarthy, the man who terrorised America for five years.

NEW WORLD ORDER

U.S. steps up force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

[In short, this is nothing more or less than a particularly violent suppression of protest.]

FREE SPEECH

Burning crosses ... on Danish flags

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

POLICE STATE

Taser guns to be trialled in NSW

New South Wales' newly-formed riot squad will be allowed to trial an electrical stun gun to incapacitate offenders. The taser guns incapacitate people with a five second burst of an electrical current.
Police Minister Carl Scully dismissed concerns about potential misuse.
The circumstances of their use are yet to be determined and it is unclear how quickly they will be put into operation

[US police have a long history of abusing this weapon on the elderly, children, teens, and even people who don't obey commands immediately after being electrocuted (because they are paralysed).
One out of every four suspects shocked with Tasers was unarmed, nonviolent and not posing an apparent immediate threat.
While health risks from Taser shocks remain under debate, officers have fired them at the very young and the very old -- at least 35 people 16 and younger, including a 13-year-old girl, and seven people 61 or older, including an 86-year-old man, were shocked. At least three women claiming to be pregnant were shocked.]

NOT FUNNY

'Yes, there is the right to caricature God,' says French newspaper France Soir
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned the violent protests: "I am totally shocked and find it unacceptable that because there have been caricatures in the West, extremists can burn flags or take fundamentalist or extremist positions which would prove the cartoonists right."

Cartoon row highlights deep divisions

A great deal of the Islamic literature about Muhammad is hagiographic - that is, unstinting in its praise.
It elevates the founder of Islam to a unique level of perfection and infallibility.
Despite the Koranic emphasis on the fundamentally human nature of Mohammed, the hagiographic tradition continues to dominate perceptions of the Prophet.
The row over the Danish cartoons would probably have remained a local dispute between some Muslims and a Danish newspaper had it not been for three factors:
* the rise of violent political Islam
* America's war on terror
* modern transnational media.

[America's war on terror is still largely perceived in the Arab world as a war on Islam - a perception reinforced by the fact that it is happening exclusively in Muslim countries, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.]

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Pentagon propaganda to 'Go Army!' aimed at schools

All over the country, organized citizens are fighting to restrict the military’s presence in schools.  But having recruiters troll high schools cafeterias is just one way the Pentagon inundates our youngsters with messages to “Go Army!”   
Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has spent a half-million dollars a year creating a database it claims is “arguably the largest repository of 16-25 year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records.” In Pentagonese the database is part of the Joint Advertising, Marketing Research and Studies (JAMRS) project.  Its purpose, along with additional millions spent on polling and marketing research, is to give the Pentagon’s $4 billion annual recruiting budget maximum impact.

[Students who ‘opt out’ of having their information turned over to recruiters by their school are just shifted into another column in the JAMRS database, called the ‘suppression list.’]

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Customs `camps' cause for concern

Maybe a lifetime in the news business makes one paranoid. Or maybe it was just a matter of timing.
The story showed up in Tuesday's Press-Telegram, as I was reading "Night," Elie Wiesel's horrifying autobiography of a teenager in Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
Appearing on page A5, the story said the federal government had awarded a $385 million contract for the construction of "temporary detention facilities." These would be used, the story said, in the event of an "immigration emergency."

[The new detention camps will be built by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's defense-related corporate giant with fists full of contracts involving the war in Iraq.]

CRYPTO ARCHAEOLOGY

Rock paintings book causes Kimberley controversy

A book on the controversial rock art paintings, the Bradshaws, is causing a stir in their homeland in the Kimberley before its release in the region's bookshops.
Ian Wilson's book Lost World of the Kimberley suggests that the paintings scattered across the Kimberley could have been the work of a race which flourished in Australia before the last ice age.
But his theories have disturbed native title holders like Donny Woolagoodja, who claims his ancestors created the art.

[According to legend, they were made by birds. It was said that these birds pecked the rocks until their beaks bled, and then created these fine paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood. This art is of such antiquity that no pigment remains on the rock surface, it is impossible to use carbon dating technology. The composition of the original paints cant be determined, and whatever pigments were used have been locked into the rock itself as shades of Mulberry red, and have become impervious to the elements.]

OVER REACTION

One of the cartoons said to incite death threats ... Quid pro quo.

Danish PM 'deeply distressed' over cartoons

Danish Prime Minister Andres Fogh Rasmussen has told Al Arabiya television that he was "deeply distressed" that Muslims were offended by cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Twelve cartoons of Mohammed first published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last September, including a portrayal of the Islam's founder wearing a bomb-shaped turban, have provoked a firestorm of indignation in the Muslim world and a boycott of Danish products in most Arab countries.

Editors of French and German papers that republished them said press freedom was more important than the protests and boycotts the cartoons have sparked across the Muslim world.
The Danish embassy in Damascus was evacuated after a bomb threat that turned out to be a hoax and Syria recalled its ambassador from Denmark in protest against the cartoons, one of which shows the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.

Denmark's largest selling broadsheet finally admitted it had made a mistake, and published an apology (in Danish, English and Arabic)

Honourable Citizens of The Muslim World
Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten is a strong proponent of democracy and freedom of religion. The newspaper respects the right of any human being to practise his or her religion. Serious misunderstandings in respect of some drawings of the Prophet Mohammed have led to much anger and, lately, also boycott of Danish goods in Muslim countries.
Please allow me to correct these misunderstandings.
On 30 September last year, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten published 12 different cartoonists' idea of what the Prophet Mohammed might have looked like. The initiative was taken as part of an ongoing public debate on freedom of expression, a freedom much cherished in Denmark.
In our opinion, the 12 drawings were sober. They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologize.
Since then a number of offensive drawings have circulated in The Middle East which have never been published in Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten and which we would never have published, had they been offered to us. We would have refused to publish them on the grounds that they violated our ethical code.
Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten attaches importance to upholding the highest ethical standards based upon the respect of our fundamental values. It is so much more deplorable, therefore, that these drawings were presented as if they had anything to do with Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten.
Maybe because of culturally based misunderstandings, the initiative to publish the 12 drawings has been interpreted as a campaign against Muslims in Denmark and the rest of the world. I must categorically dismiss such an interpretation. Because of the very fact that we are strong proponents of the freedom of religion and because we respect the right of any human being to practise his or her religion, offending anybody on the grounds of their religious beliefs is unthinkable to us.
That this happened was, consequently, unintentional.
As a result of the debate that has been going on about the drawings, we have met with representatives of Danish Muslims, and these meetings were held in a positive and constructive spirit. We have also sought in other ways to initiate a fruitful dialogue with Danish Muslims.
It is the wish of Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten that various ethnic groups should live in peace and harmony with each other and that the debates and disagreements which will always exist in a dynamic society should do so in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
For that reason, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has published many articles describing the positive aspects of integration, for example in a special supplement entitled The Contributors. It portrayed a number of Muslims who have had success in Denmark. The supplement was rewarded by the EU Commission.
Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten takes exception to symbolic acts suited to demonise specific nationalities, religions and ethnic groups.
Sincerely yours, Carsten Juste, Editor-in-Chief

TENTH PLANET

Xena, or UB313, on the left is just smaller than our Moon (Image: Nature)
Xena bigger than Pluto

Xena, the possible 10th planet in our solar system, is even larger then Pluto, research shows.
Astronomers led by Professor Frank Bertoldi of Germany's University of Bonn say Xena, or 2003 UB313 to give it its official name, has a diameter of about 3000 kilometers, about 700 kilometres larger than Pluto's.
This would make UB313 the largest solar system object to be spotted since the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
Astronomers have been debating the status of UB313 ever since the announcement last year that it had been discovered 15 billion kilometres from Earth.
Pluto's defenders blasted it, saying it was not a planet ... but a vulgar rock.
The polite term for such abuse is a KBO, Kuiper Belt Object, for the estimated 100,000 pieces of icy, primeval debris that slowly encircle the Sun on the outskirts of the solar system, far beyond the orbit of Neptune.

[Since UB313 is decidedly larger than Pluto, it is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status]

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]

BIG BROTHER

How Spy Chips Are Quietly Reshaping Privacy

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

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

BIG BROTHER

Rumsfeld Spies on Quakers and Grannies

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

ENDLESS WAR

The Other Army

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

EARTH CHANGES

Global warming 'past the point of no return'

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

Steve Connor: Vicious cycle will affect climate of northern hemisphere

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

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

EARTH CHANGES

2005 hottest year ever in Australia

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

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

NEWSPEAK

Euphemisms the rule. Plain english a casualty

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

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

BULLSHIT BAFFLES

Alibi Network helps people keep their secrets for a small fee

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

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

BAH HUMBUG

Christian soldiers battle the 'War on Christmas'

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

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

CLIMATE OF CHANGE

Changing the face of 'old' New York

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

EARTH CHANGES

Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

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

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

MATH IS MURDER

Calls grow for withdrawal of Nobel prize

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

RIGHTS TRASHED

ACLU: Protesters placed in terror files

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

[The FBI files are available here.]

ENDLESS WAR

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

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

Eyewitnesses refute official story

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

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

PAPER TRAIL

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

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

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

ASSEMBLY LINE

Nanotech discovery could have radical implications

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

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

COACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Brothers die in crashes just minutes apart

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

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

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

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

Quantum Entanglement Between Remote Ensembles of Atoms Achieved

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

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

POWER AND PASSION

Bush and Blair slated by Pinter

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

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

EARTH CHANGES

Greenland glacier races to ocean

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

[]

SEDITION BITES

Australian bloggers muzzled

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

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

WATER WARS

Choking on Chemicals in China

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

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

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

POWER POINT

Bullet Points over Baghdad

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

[NY Times original]

PROJECT PAPERCLIP

Dark side of the Moon

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

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

SONIC WEAPON

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


Pirates shoot at Britons' cruise liner

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

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

FLAWED LOGIC

Bush visits China

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

A freer economy will yield a freer political system

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

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

MONEY PIT

For sale: Oak Islands buried mystery

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

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

FUEL'S PARADISE?

Power source that turns physics on its head

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

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

AETHER UPDATE

Einstein's wrong, relatively speaking

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

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

MAGNETIC EARTH

New clues to make magnets more powerful

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

[The findings are published in Physical Review Letter]

FREE SPEECH

Airports at vanguard of dissent-crushing

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

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

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

PRIME TARGET

Red carpet for warmonger

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

Adelaide to be locked down for Rumsfeld visit

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

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

ICEMAN COMETH

Death renews iceman 'curse' claim

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

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