NEW WORLD ORDER

The scum always rises


Zoltan Torey (b 1929, Budapest, Hungary)
Psychologist, philosopher, independent scholar and author of autobiographical memoir "Out of Darkness" and "The Crucible of Consciousness"
Broadcast July 2003, repeated LNL 2007-06-15
CLASSIC Late Night Live (ABC Radio, Australia)

PHILIP ADAMS: ... I asked him about his statement that after Hungary declares war on the Soviet, there were scum that took advantage of the situation.

TOREY: Ah yes, the scum is always there. One of the lessons I have learned is that about 90% of the population consists of decent, normal people who mind their own business and who don't want trouble.
Now, 10% is all that is needed to give us permanent trouble.
About one third of it is ideologues. Ideologues, whether they are Marxists, economic rationalists, nazis, communists, makes no difference.
These are people who really believe in the fact that it is some mental model that constitutes reality. And this is what has to be followed, regardless. A bit like the medieval church ... essentially a very dangerous organisation and frame of mind.
The second third of this 10% consists of opportunists. People who are quite willing to cash in on whatever goes and to milk the system and to lord it over us and to push us around and to bring us into situations which are not of our chosing, whether they be wars or economic changes or whatnot.
And a final third of this 10% consists of the thugs. Young men usually, sometimes psychopathic. But basically people prepared to do anybody's dirty work.

OUR COSMOS

Astronomers spot most distant galaxies ever seen

Astronomers using a giant telescope say they have found glimpses of the most distant -- and oldest -- galaxies ever seen.
"The light the researchers viewed originated when the universe was only 500 million years old and has been traveling through distant space for billions of years, said Richard Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
This means the team found galaxies further back in time than anyone has ever seen as scientists try to better understand how the universe was born some 13.5 billion years ago, he said.
Ellis is due to present his findings of work he did with graduate student Dan Stark at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"The implication is these are the early generation of stars switched on when the universe was in its infancy."
The team used the giant Keck telescope in Hawaii.

QUANTUM UNIVERSE

'Hidden' order ups odds for quantum super computers

An international team of scientists, including several at The Johns Hopkins University, has detected a hidden magnetic “quantum order” that extends over chains of nearly 100 atoms in a material that is otherwise magnetically disordered. The findings have been published in the journal Science,
The team’s results are important because they demonstrate that the magnetic moments (the measure of the strength of a magnetic source) of a large number of atoms can band together to form quantum states much like those of a very large molecule.
Though, on the surface, these atomic “compass needles” seem to be disorganized and disordered, the team was able to discern “a beautiful, underlying quantum order,” said team member Collin Broholm, professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
“Quantum mechanics is normally appreciated only on the atomic scale. However, here we present evidence for a very long and very quantum mechanical magnetic molecule,” Broholm said.
“While disordered to a classical observer, the magnetic moments of almost 100 nickel atoms arranged in a row within a solid were shown to display an underlying quantum coherence limited only by chemical and thermal impurities."

POWER WITHOUT GLORY

Haneef: I was the victim

On Sunday morning Australia's Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said that Dr Haneef's decision to travel to India after having his passport returned "heightens rather than lessens my suspicion".
Mr Andrews said he still believed the decision to throw the doctor out of Australia was the right one.

Dr Haneef returned home to Bangalore after 27 days in police custody, leaving behind a political storm which has erupted since the terrorism-related charge against him was dropped on Friday.

EARTH CHANGES

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Ministers accused of 'driving' Haneef case

Civil libertarians say any inquiry into the bungled prosecution of Dr Mohamed Haneef should focus squarely on the actions of Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock and Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.

The terrorism-related charge against the 27-year-old Indian was dropped yesterday after prosecutors abandoned their case amid revelations of mistakes in the case against him.

The outrages concerning this case include:

1. Accusations by the prosecuting lawyer that the mobile phone SIM card which Dr Haneef was alleged to have given to his second cousin in Britain was found in the burning Jeep rammed into Glasgow airport.

[The SIM card, given to his cousin a year ago, was discovered not in Glasgow but in Liverpool.]

2. Police claimed he offered no explanation of why he tried to leave Brisbane on a one-way ticket to India.

[A transcript of his first police interview, leaked to the press by his defence team, showed he did: he wanted to see his wife, who had just given birth to their child.]

3. When the magistrate at that hearing in Brisbane, Jacqui Payne, decided to grant the doctor conditional bail, the government controversially intervened. Kevin Andrews, the immigration minister, decided to cancel his visa and keep him detained under immigration laws.

4. Following a story in the Queensland press Police at first refused to confirm or deny whether its officers found photographs of a prominent Gold Coast building and documents relating to the destroying of structures while searching Haneef's unit.

5. Police officers wrote the names of terrorism suspects in Haneef's personal diary after he was taken in for questioning in Brisbane. The paper says police then asked Haneef if he had written the names, before admitting their mistake.

THE QUICKENING

Study has bad news about sea level rise

A study by scientists at the institute of Arctic and Alpine Research of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has bad news for coastal areas around the world.
The team, led by Mark F. Meier, suggests in Science magazine that the latest International Panel on Climate Change projection of sea level rise in the 21st century by is too low by 10-25 centimeters because it leaves out the contributions of increasing glacier melt water.
To quote New Scientist, the IPCC report "predicted that sea levels worldwide will most probably rise between 21 and 47 cm by 2100, taking the averages of the six scenarios considered.
Using the new figures on small glaciers, Meier calculates the rise to be between 27 and 97 cm.
"This is an appreciable adjustment," Meier says. He notes that more than 100 million people live within one meter of the current sea level.

CAT A TONIC

Cat predicts patients' deaths

A cat at a US nursing home appears to be able to predict when patients are going to die. According to an essay in the respected New England Journal of Medicine, Oscar's predictions are proving more accurate than trained medical staff.
A detailed essay of Oscar's behaviour in the New England Journal Of Medical Science says the cat has presided over the deaths of 25 patients in the advanced dementia unit of Steere House in Providence, Rhode Island.
Oscar, rescued as a kitten from an animal refuge two years ago, does not usually care much for human company but every now and then, he snaps to attention, seeks out a patient and curls up in bed next to them.
He stays there paying attention to the patient as family members say their goodbyes and the priest give last rights, and then dissappears once the patient has died.
Oscar's predictions have been so accurate that staff now call a patient's family if the cat appears purring at the door. Loved ones often have just enough time to say goodbye.

BROWN BROWN

MIT finds mechanism behind fear

Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have uncovered a molecular mechanism that governs the formation of fears stemming from traumatic events.

The work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers.

[Child soldiers used by African warlords drug their young recruits with 'brown brown' to eradicate fear and help instil a murderous rage.]

DIRTY CREATURES

Toxic spill, inferno follows rail crash

Carriages burn after a freight train carrying highly toxic phosphorus derailed in western Ukraine, near Lviv. Eleven carriages loaded with yellow phosphorus derailed and erupted in flames in the Lvov region, Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry official Alexander Kravchuk said.

HYDRA PHOBIA

The Hydra was a many-headed monster from Greek mythology. If any of its heads were severed two would grow in its place.

Al Qaeda recoups post-9/11 losses: report

Leaks of a US intelligence report show Al Qaeda's operating capabilities are at their strongest since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.The report suggests the network has rebuilt itself despite a six-year campaign to dismantle it.

Al Qaeda getting stronger: experts

"It's a paradox: we have succeeded in degrading the operational capabilities of the jihadist enterprise and yet almost every assessment indicates that we are not succeeding," RAND Corp terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins said.

US backs Pakistan's campaign to crush militants

General Musharraf has vowed to root out extremists from every corner of the country, and the United States says it fully supports Pakistan's efforts to crush Islamic militants.

Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser to US President George W Bush says the situation is of concern to the US.

"We have seen, in the north-west territories of Pakistan, Taliban pooling, planning and training," he said.

Pakistanis baffled by US support for their corrupt military dictatorship

Well, it could have something to do with the fact that Musharraf’s regime has supported the Taliban and Al Qaeda which are the boogy-men needed to wage the phony War on Terror and that the Pakistani ISI, which has trained Al Qaeda, is a front for CIA’s plausible denialability.

Then there was the little matter of ISI Gen Mahmoud Ahmed, who had wired Mohammed Atta money, and who was meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee on the morning of 9/11. But the 9/11 Commission didn’t think that merited investigation.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Expulsions escalate UK-Russia diplomatic row

London has expelled four Russian diplomats in protest over Moscow's refusal to extradite a former KGB agent to stand trial over the murder.

In response, Russia has warned of serious consequences and that is expected to include tit-for-tat expulsions of British diplomats.

It is nearly nine months since Litvinenko, a former Russian agent living in exile in the UK, died a horrifying and lingering death after he was poisoned by the highly radioactive isotope, polonium 210, which is used as a trigger in nuclear weapons.

HOT AIR

Howard grilled on emissions package

Australian Prime Minister John Howard says Australia needs to move on from the Kyoto protocol and take a market approach to tackle climate change.

But the full details of its carbon trading scheme have not been revealed yet.

Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett says the Federal Government's carbon emissions trading scheme cannot work until it sets a price on carbon.

[Market approaches continue to fail the presupposed beneficiaries -- the people.]

WAR ON SHARING

© abk.

GEOMETRY

Moebius strip riddle solved at last

A moebius strip is a loop that has an intriguing quality, dazzlingly exploited by Escher, in that it only has one side. To make one, take one end of a strip, twist it through 180 degrees, and then tape it to the other end.

Since 1930, the Moebius strip has been a classic poser to resolve the in the form of an equation.

In a study Gert van der Heijden and Eugene Starostin of University College London, say the strip's shape is its differing areas of "energy density".

"Energy density" means the stored, elastic energy that is contained in the strip as a result of the folding. Places where the strip is most bent have the highest energy density; conversely, places that are flat and unstressed by a fold have the least energy density.

If the width of the strip increases in proportion to its length, the zones of energy density also shift, which in term alters the shape, according to their equations.

A wider strip, for instance, leads to nearly flat, "triangular" regions in the strip, a phenomenon that also happens when paper is crumpled.

MARKET FORCES

Mystics and merchants in fourteenth century Germany

The thesis of this paper is that fourteenth century German mystics administered psychotherapy to fourteenth century German merchants, thereby aiding the efforts of the merchants to rationalize commerce and society. The argument runs that the merchants' emphasis on economic rationalism violated traditional values of the Church and of medieval society in general. Since the Church and the associated social order were perceived as controlling every man's chances for salvation, the merchants felt anxious and guilty about their rationalist tendencies, and were therefore tempted to dilute them. Another solution, however, was to continue the rationalism but to seek therapy for the anxiety and guilt that it evoked. Mysticmonks were among those who provided such therapy. Analyses and speculations are offered regarding the symbolism that goaded the therapy forward.

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion: Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1969), pp. 47-59

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Russia suspends arms control pact

Russian President Vladimir Putin has suspended the application of a key Cold War arms control treaty.

Mr Putin signed a decree citing "exceptional circumstances" affecting security as the reason for the move.

Russia has been angered by US plans to base parts of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

EARTH CHANGES

Warming waters to drive fish south: CSIRO

A CSIRO study of the waters off the south-east coast of Australia reveals that they are warming up faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere.

The scientists warn that these warmer waters will not only dramatically change the marine environment, but could devastate local fisheries.

However fisherman from the area say they are not worried yet because they have just had their best catch in years.

DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

Missing the vote

Tightening of the electoral roll provisions may mean tens of thousands of Australian citizens will miss out on voting in the forthcoming federal elections.

Should prisoners be allowed to vote?

Today a full bench of the High Court will start considering the case of Vicki Lee Roach, an inmate of a Melbourne jail. Her lawyers will argue that the ban on prisoners voting in parliamentary elections is unconstitutional.

FLASHBACK

Electoral commissioner appointed in clouded circumstances

(May 25, 2005) A career public servant will head the Australian Electoral Commission amid claims the selection committee for the post was tainted by a political operator.

Ian Campbell, deputy president of the Repatriation Commission and a member of the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission, will succeed Andy Becker as the electoral commissioner from July 2.

FLASHBACK

Finding fault where there was none before

(Apr 4, 2006) SOMETHING puzzling has happened at the Australian Electoral Commission over the past 12 months.

In March 2005, when it made its first submission to the parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the 2004 federal election, the AEC expressed no concern whatsoever about the workload it faces at each election, when voters are given seven days' grace to enrol or to update their enrolments.

Nor did it express its support for the argument that the last-minute rush of enrolments creates opportunities for electoral fraud. Although several members of the committee repeatedly returned to the issue, they failed to persuade the commission to support the closure of the electoral roll as soon as the prime minister calls an election.

Almost exactly a year later, appearing before a Senate committee on March 7, recently appointed Australian Electoral Commissioner Ian Campbell expressed almost exactly the opposite view.

The committee was inquiring into the innocuously titled Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill [PDF], which proposes to abolish the period of grace and - if history is any guide - prevent perhaps 300,000 otherwise eligible people from voting at the next federal election. The committee reported to the Senate on March 28 and the Coalition majority supported early roll closure.

HELL IS FOR CHILDREN

Catholic school gives in over Hell enrolment

A row over a Melbourne Catholic school refusing to enrol a boy whose surname is Hell has been resolved.

Max Hell had applied for a prep place at St Peter Apostle Primary School at Hoopers Crossing in Melbourne's west.

His father, Alex, says he was refused because of his surname.But the Catholic Education Office says the matter has been resolved.

The office says the school was concerned the child would be teased.

Pat Benatar - Hell is for Children

BUDDY JESUS

you're the shit ... no really, I mean it ...

GOOD NEWS

BBC reporter free after 'terrifying' ordeal

Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist held hostage in the Gaza Strip since March, has been freed by his Islamist captors.

"It was an absolutely appalling experience. You can imagine 16 weeksof solitary confinement in the hands of people who sometimes talkedabout killing you and so on.
"I literally dreamt many, many times of being free and always wokeup back in that room and now it really is over and it is indescribablygood to be out."

Related: Kidnappers threaten to 'slaughter'

EARTH CHANGES

'Scepticism' over climate claims

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

The Royal Society said most climate scientists believed humans were having an "unprecedented" effect on climate.

The survey suggested that terrorism, graffiti, crime and dog mess were all of more concern than climate change.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Democrat fury as Bush commutes Libby jail term

US President George W Bush has commuted the prison sentence of former top White House official Lewis 'Scooter' Libby.

Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney, was originally jailed for two-and-a-half years for obstructing an investigation into who blew the cover of a CIA agent whose husband criticised the Iraq war.

The original sentence outraged some Republicans and Mr Bush was under pressure to issue a pardon. Instead Mr Bush has commuted the sentence, which means Libby still has to pay $US250,000 in fines but will escape a jail term.

"I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr Libby is excessive," Mr Bush said in a statement.
"Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr Libby's sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison."

Mr Bush's decision has been condemned by the top Democrat in the US Senate.
"The President's decision to commute Mr Libby's sentence is disgraceful," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said in a first reaction to the move.
"Libby's conviction was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq war.
"Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone," he said in a statement.

SHOOT THE MESSENGER

Kidnappers threaten to 'slaughter'

A Palestinian militant group holding BBC reporter Alan Johnston says there is no deal to free the Briton abducted in Gaza three months ago and says he will only be released if its demands were met.

A man identified as a spokesman for the Army of Islam in Gaza told Al Jazeera television said, "If they do not meet our demands there will be no release for that detainee and if things become more difficult ... then we would seek God's satisfaction by slaughtering this journalist," the spokesman said, identified as Abu Khatab.

THE QUICKENING

NASA: "Earth in Peril" - Several metre sea level rise this century

Sea levels will rise by several metres by the end of the century due to rapidly increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, according to research by a group of esteemed international scientists. Led by James Hansen from NASA's Goddard Institute, the group warns that the Earth is 'perilously' close to entering a new era of dangerous runaway climate change.

The peer-reviewed paper predicts that humans have less than ten years to make substantial reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. The West Antarctic ice sheet in particular is dangerously sensitive, with the potential to add over five metres to global sea levels within two centuries when collapsed.

"This paper spells devastation for Australia," said Matthew Wright, lead spokesman for Beyond Zero Emissions. "The impact of the predicted sea level rise will have cataclysmic effects for the millions of Australians in coastal communities around the nation. The events in New South Wales recently are just a small taste of what's to come."

DISAPPEARING ACT

30m deep Andes lake disappears

A two hectare glacial lake in Chile's southern Andes has disappeared -- and scientists want to know why.

Park rangers at Bernardo O'Higgins National Park said they found a 100-feet-deep crater in late May where the lake had been in March.

"The lake had simply disappeared," Juan Jose Romero, head of Chile's National Forest Service in the southernmost region of Magallanes, said. "No one knows what happened".

A group of geologists and other experts will be sent to the area 2000 km southeast of Santiago in the next few days to investigate, Romero said.

One theory is the water disappeared through cracks in the lake bottom into underground fissures.

But experts do not know why the cracks would have appeared because there have been no earthquakes reported in the area recently, Romero said.

[Water-powered UFOs responsible?]

FLASHBACK

Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom

Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. They had been probing for oil under the floor of Lake Peigneur when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the muddy surface, and they were unable free it. In their attempts to work the drill loose, which is normally fairly easy at that shallow depth, the men heard a series of loud pops, just before the rig tilted precariously towards the water.

At the time, Lake Peigneur was an unremarkable body of water near New Iberia, Louisiana. Though the freshwater lake covered 1,300 acres of land, it was only eleven feet deep. A small island there was home to a beautiful botanical park, oil wells dotted the landscape, and far beneath the lake were miles of tunnels for the Diamond Crystal salt mine.

Concluding that something had gone terribly wrong, the men on the rig cut the attached barges loose, scrambled off the rig, and moved to the shore about 300 yards away. Shortly after they abandoned the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, the crew watched in amazement as the huge platform and derrick overturned, and disappeared into a lake that was supposed to be shallow.

Soon the water around that position began to turn. It was slow at first, but it steadily accelerated until it became a fast-moving whirlpool a quarter of a mile in diameter, with its center directly over the drill site.

[Watch a video of this event (includes short advert at start)]

VIRGIN BIRTH

Shark pregnancy baffles aquarium

Sharks only breed with sharks of the same species, and there were no male blacktip reef sharks at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach.

Could the blacktip reef shark 'Tidbit' have defied nature, resulting in the first known shark hybrid? The other possibility was that Tidbit had conceived without needing a male at all.

A recent study had documented the first confirmed case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks: a pup born at a Nebraska zoo came from an egg that developed in a female shark without sperm from a male.

One of the scientists who worked on that study contacted the aquarium, which sent him tissue samples from Tidbit and her pup for testing.

If the pup's DNA turns out to contain no contribution from a male shark, this would be the second known case of shark parthenogenesis.

STATE SECRETS

Observers concerned by 'climate of secrecy'

Prominent Australian author and journalist David Marr says the silencing of public servants reflects a disturbing pattern in the last decade.

His thesis outlined in the latest 'Quarterly Essay' warns thuggish spin doctoring and punitive legislation like the 2005 sedition laws, have been used by all Australian governments to shut down criticism, and starve journalists of information the public has the right to know.

DAVID MARR, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST: The rules of secrecy have been policed as they have never been before in Australia in peace time. There is a squad, the Australian Federal Police. They work tens of thousands of hours chasing down leaks to the press. That's their work. They prosecute. People are supposed to go to jail for telling the public things the public needs to know.

Australia's News Limited chief John Hartigan: Journalists today are thwarted pretty much everywhere they goin getting the most basic information. It means that we're living in astate and a country that's saturated by censorship and secrecy.

CASHLESSNESS

Cash machine inventor predicts its demise

The inventor of the ATM cash machine, John Shepherd-Barron, believes their use in future will be very different.

On the 40th anniversary of the instalation of the first machine, the inventor predicts people will no longer be using cash within a few years.

"Money costs money to transport. I am therefore predicting the demise of cash within three to five years."

He believes fervently that we will soon be swiping our mobile phones at till points, even for small transactions.

SAUDI OF THE SOUTH

Treasures of the Red Continent: Australia's Natural Resources Boom

The current natural resources boom is good news for Australia which has a plentiful supply of precious metals. Never before have mining corporations extracted so much iron ore, copper, gold or uranium and exported it worldwide, especially to China. But is Australia becoming dangerously dependent?

Many are already calling this region the "Saudi Arabia of the South". And that's not even exaggerated: The Gulf state controls more than 20pc of the world's oil reserves, but more than a third of all knownuranium reserves are located in Olympic Dam. It's the world's largesturanium deposit.

Australia provides the resources China needs so urgently for itseconomic miracle. In return, China provides Australia with all thecheap cooking pots, washing machines and cars it manufactures from themetal. "We would be crazy not to develop this relationship," saysAustralian Prime Minister John Howard.

Qualified workers are now in short supply. Many Australian corporations have to defer or even cancel business agreements. The lack of mechanics, architects or geologists is slowing the country's economic growth. Meanwhile, the price of housing has risen to astronomical levels. Economists warn that the real estate bubble could burst any time -- especially in the major cities, where most Australians live.

Many are concerned the economy is becoming dangerously one-sided and over-dependent on natural resources. Many people are already worried that Australia's mining companies are relying too heavily on China.

[Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Australian counterpart John Howard have signed an agreement that facilitates uranium exports from Australia. The Howard administration cites special clauses in the agreement that the Chinese have to observe - pledging to use the uranium for civilian purposes only.]

ESCHATOLOGICAL REASONING

The document reveals that Newton predicted the world will end in 2060

The world will end in 2060, according to Newton

His famously analytical mind worked out the laws of gravity and unravelled the motion of the planets.

And when it came to predicting the end of the world, Sir Isaac Newton was just as precise.

He believed the Apocalypse would come in 2060 – exactly 1260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, according to a recently published letter.

THE QUICKENING

Rising sea level forecasts understated, say scientists

A group of climate scientists in the United States says a United Nations panel of experts has underestimated a predicted rise in sea levels this century.

The UN panel forecast that global warming would result in a rise of between 18cm and 59cm.

One of the scientists who believes this is well short of the mark is James Hansen of NASA, who believes the sea level will rise several metres by the end of this century.

Dr Hansen argues that the UN panel did not take into account melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica.

"That's beginning to lose mass and it is situated on bedrock which is below sea level, so it's potentially unstable and could give a very large sea-level rise," he said.

THE QUICKENING

The real world looks to be changing faster than the models predict

Arctic spring's 'rapid advance'

Spring in the Arctic is arriving "weeks earlier" than a decade ago, a team of Danish researchers have reported.
Ice in north-east Greenland is melting an average of 14.6 days earlier than in the mid-1990s, bringing forward the date plants flower and birds lay eggs.
The team warned that the observed changes could disrupt the region's ecosystems and food chain, affecting the long-term survival of some species.

HEART OF DARKNESS

White House denies prior knowledge of Abu Ghraib abuse

The top military investigator of the Abu Ghraib scandal, retired Army Major General Antonio Taguba says he described to former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld what he termed the "torture" of "a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum," the magazine reported.

The ex-general, who retired in January, spoke of other, undisclosed material on the Abu Ghraib abuse, including descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees.

He also told the magazine he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee," adding the video was never made public or mentioned in any court or in public.

Maj Gen Taguba says all high-level officials had avoided scrutiny while the jail keepers at Abu Ghraib were tried in courts-martial.

"From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Maj Gen Taguba told the New Yorker, adding his orders were to investigate the military police only and not their superiors.

"These (military police) troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority."

NAZISM RISING

Exposed underwear and low-slung trousers ... the height of style.

US town set to ban saggy trousers

A mayor in the US state of Louisiana says he will sign into law a proposal to make wearing saggy trousers an act of indecent exposure.

Delcambre town council unanimously passed the ordinance earlier this week making it a crime to wear trousers that show underwear.

"If you expose your private parts, you'll get a fine" of US$500 Mayor Carol Broussard said.

VOICE OF REASON

Guantanamo trials unfair: Nuremberg prosecutor

The US war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the US Nuremberg prosecutors says.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr said.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

King, 88, served under Jackson, the US Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the trials created by the Allied powers to try Nazi military and political leaders after World War II in Nuremberg, Germany.

DARFUR NIGHTMARE

"One World, One Dream"

"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under the rug.

That nightmare is Darfur, where more than 400,000 people have been killed and more than two-and-a-half million driven from flaming villages by the Chinese-backed government of Sudan.

That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg -- who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympics.

The Wall Street Journal [Full article]

FLASHBACK

Powell denies Guantanamo beating claims :: 13/03/2004

US Secretary of State Colin Powell says he does not believe accusations by a recently freed British inmate of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp that he has been treated in an inhuman fashion.

Jamal al Harith, the first of five Britons to go free, said animals in the prison camp are given better treatment than inmates.But Mr Powell denies that the detainees have been treated badly.

Mr al Harith, who was held for two years without charge, claims he was beaten.

"I think that unlikely," said Mr Powell."We don't abuse people who are in our care. I think we have discharged all of our obligations under the Geneva Convention to treat people in our custody, our detainees, in a very humanitarian way."

HELL ON EARTH

Ghost Prisoners

Shackled, gagged and blindfolded, they are bundled on to spy planes, spirited to Third World capitals and dumped in prison hellholes. There they face repeated interrogations that typically include prolonged sessions of torture, crudely inflicted, unimaginably endured.

A few of these men, like Canada’s Maher Arar, whisked off the streets of New York to Syria, or Australia’s Mamdouh Habib, captured in Pakistan and delivered to Egypt’s intelligence service, eventually emerge to tell their chilling stories. Dozens remain unaccounted for.

TARNISHED MEDALS

Olympic firms 'abusing workers'

Some official merchandise for the 2008 Olympics in China has been made using child labour, forced overtime and low wages to boost profits, a report says.

Playfair - an alliance of world trade unions - has condemned "severe workers' rights violations" in four Chinese factories ahead of the Beijing games.

Beijing gets top marks from IOC

Beijing has been given a big thumbs up by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) after a three-day inspection.

OIL WARS

Iraq's Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, launched a limited strike to underline its call for keeping oil in public hands, and to force the government to live up to its economic promises.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out the army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. Then he issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders.

MIND GAMES

Cliff Richard records rout funfair yobs

If you want to get rid of troublemaking youths, play them some Cliff Richard songs, a funfair has found.

According to bosses from Carter's Steam Fair, playing tracks such as Living Doll by the 66-year-old pop veteran on all their rides was enough to scare off some "hoodies" and other troublemakers who had descended on the fair last Saturday in north London.

"Who needs ASBOs when we've got our Cliff Richard records?," said the fair's Seth Carter.

DAD'S DART CLUB APLICATION

© abk.

LOGO NO GO

Claims London Olympics logo ad causing epileptic fits

The widely ridiculed new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has become the centre of another controversy.

Animation for the logo has been dropped after complaints that it had caused some viewers to suffer epileptic fits. The short animated sequence of a diver plunging into a pool contains rapid flashes of colour.

One man says he blanked out after seeing the advertisement on tv.

[The cost of the logo sent many Brits into a fit too. It cost £400,000 to make.]

MUSHROOM SOUP

Australia's New Nuclear Ambitions

"Australians are left uninformed about what is really going on" concerning the Howard government's thinking about nuclear energy.

"But, for speculation, there are a number of indicative straws blowing in the wind", with possibilities including enhanced exports, nuclear waste imports, uranium enrichment, nuclear waste reprocessing, and even nuclear power generation.Broinowski concludes:

"Outlandish as it may seem to many Australians, the challenge may soon be to reassure Australia's neighbours, especially Indonesia, that Mr Howard has no plans to build nuclear weapons in Australia."

[Richard Broinowski, former diplomat and Adjunct Professor at theUniversity of Sydney,Austral Policy Forum 06-24A, 24 July 2006.]

THE QUICKENING

Warming hits 'tipping point'

In Siberia, 1 million square km of permafrost - 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.

HEART OF DARKNESS

Tony Lagouranis with a photo of one of his Iraqi interrogation subjects.

The Tortured Lives of Interrogators

In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man's pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners' sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.

But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best friend hung out with him, watching reruns of "Hawaii Five-O." And yet he felt afraid.

"I tortured people," said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. "You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that."

[ABC Four Corners this week looks into the dark world of torture.]

EARTH CHANGES

China puts economy before climate

China says its first and overriding priority in tackling climate change is to maintain economic development.

The remarks come in China's first national plan on climate change.

WAR ON DRUGS

Graphic anti-smoking campaigns work

Mass media campaigns are one of the most effective means to reduce smoking.

Evaluation of Australia's famous 'Every cigarette is doing you damage' ad shows that after the first six months of the mass media campaign smoking rates in Australia dropped by 1.4 per cent, representing 190,000 fewer smokers.

An economic evaluation has shown that the campaign was excellent value for money and resulted in significant savings to the health system.

[Compare this to the enormously unsuccessful War on Drugs with its harsher penalties, longer jail terms and the inhumane zero-tolerance.]

TRADITIONAL MEDICINE

Arsenic may help treat cancer: research

Arsenic can significantly extend survival in patients with a rare form of leukemia, US researchers say.

"It's a much smaller dose than you would use to poison people," Dr Bayard Powell of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre said.

Adding arsenic to standard treatment can extend patients' lives and prevent relapse, Dr Powell says.

The effect is so impressive that patients may some day be able to skip chemotherapy but that will take more testing.

"This study has redefined the standard of care," Dr Powell said, who presented results from the large, three-year study at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Background

The patented laetrile is a partly synthetic (man-made) form of amygdalin, while the laetrile/amygdalin made in Mexico comes from crushed apricot pits."
Though it is sometimes sold as "Vitamin B17", it is not a vitamin. Amygdalin has been advocated by some as a "cure" or a "preventative" for cancer, but due to a lack of scientifically accepted evidence of its efficacy, it has not been approved for this use by the United States' Food and Drug Administration.

FRAME DRAG

© abk.

POWER OF ONE

'Goodbye America': Anti-war mother ends protest

Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother who became a figurehead for the US anti-war movement, is abandoning her fight after growing disenchanted with the campaign.

Ms Sheehan has camped outside President George W Bush's ranch since 2005, demanding a meeting over the 2004 death of her son, Casey, in Iraq.Bush has refused to 'meet with' her.never

But announcing the end of her campaign in a blog post titled "Good Riddance Attention Whore", she has also hit out at Democrats and anti-war campaigners who put "personal egos above peace and human life".

"The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning ... was that Casey did indeed die for nothing," she said."I have tried every [day] since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful.

"Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months, while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."

TRY TRIPOLE

Ferrite torus

My Moebius coil is NOT levitating itself, in the picture this is only the copper wire which maintains the coil. I have used this setup for testing the "eventual" thrust generated.
The interesting thing is that the Moebius coil is ALWAYS attracted by a grad-B field when the current flow, even if I change the current flow direction. Thus the Moebius coil can interact with the Earth magnetic field.

Some other coils designs can be used for increasing the "spacetime distorsion effect".

[29mm diam ext., 18mm diam ext., 7 mm thick.]

Rant: "This coil setup can generates some interesting effects in spacetime flow by using the divergent magnetic lines and special configuration of the vector potential. So, it seems possible to tap electromagnetic energy directly from spacetime by unipolar spherical magnets/coils...."

ANTI SOCIAL

Airport security whistleblower faces court

Allan Robert Kessing faces jail for doing something for the 'public good' but against the 'State'.

A Sydney court has heard submissions about what punishment should be given to the former customs official Allan Robert Kessing.
The whistleblower was earlier found guilty of giving a report to the media which detailed drug trafficking operations and security breaches at Sydney Airport.
The leak prompted a massive airport security review, but now Kessing is facing up to two years in jail.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Deep holes in Mars surface

[At its highest resolution of 25 centimeters per pixel, the HiRISE camera can see the detailed shape of the slightly scalloped edge of a hole on the flank of Mars' Arsia Mons (left), but no amount of image enhancement (right) can bring out any further details inside the hole. That means that the walls of the cave are overhanging -- the cave is larger below the ground than the entrance we can see at the surface -- and that it is very deep. Mars' dusty atmosphere produces enough scattered light that "skylight" would illuminate the floor of a shallow cavern well enough for HiRISE to detect it. Credit: NASA / JPL / U. Arizona]

COAL-MINE CANARIES

Cell Phones To Blame For Deserted Bee Colonies?

A small study from Landau University in Germany suggests that the navigational capabilities of honeybees may be adversely affected by radiation from GSM cell phones.

The findings could provide an answer to the mystery of disappearing bee colonies across the Western world.

The cell phone study, conducted by Landau's Jochen Kuhn, focused on the effects of cell phone radiation on the neurological mechanisms that control learning and memory.

Placing handsets near hives, Kuhn observed that GSM cell phone radiation in the frequency range 900-1800MHz caused the bees to avoid the hive.

[Kuhn speculates that the "waggle" dance that bees perform on the honeycomb to communicate with others could be influenced by the radiation.]

COAL-MINE CANARIES

Pollinate or perish

A mystery disease dubbed 'Colony Collapse Disorder' has destroyed about a quarter of the United States 2.4 million hives in the space of six months.

That means big business for Australian exporters, who are busy as bees helping to restock empty American hives.

But few Australian apiarists are rejoicing because they fear that whatever is causing the disorder may soon spread here.

In fact, just this week the CSIRO has been examining a sample of Asian honey bees recently discovered in far north Queensland, to see if they carry a mite - that just might be the source of the problem.

BOGEY WOMAN

Stoned to death
The moment a teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy.

A 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion.
Reports from Iraq said a local security force witnessed the incident, but did nothing to try to stop it. Now her boyfriend is in hiding in fear for his life.
Miss Aswad, a member of a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, was condemned to death as an "honour killing" by other men in her family and hardline religious leaders because of her relationship with the Sunni Muslim boy.

"She was abducted and brutally murdered in front of hundreds of men by her relatives -- who stripped her body, beat and kicked her, and killed her by crushing her body with rocks and concrete blocks. These brutal and inhuman acts were filmed by the participants on their mobile phones and many of them have been circulating on the internet and from phone to phone. They show the participation of the police in this disgusting communal murder and the murderous excitement of the crowd as the girl's uncle, brother and cousin comit the grisly murder” [Source]

BOGEY MAN

Bush asked yet again: Where's Osama?

President Bush was pressed about the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

He was asked what he would have thought five years ago, that the architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would still be at large.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Why is he at large? Because we haven't got him yet, Jim. That's why. And he's hiding, and we're looking. And we will continue to look until we bring him to justice. We brought a lot of his buddies to justice, but not him. That's why he's still at large.He's not out there traipsing around, he's not leading many parades however. He's not out feeding the hungry.

MICHAEL ROWLAND: Critics say the war in Iraq has diverted resources from the continuing hunt for the elusive al-Qaeda leader.

WATER WARS

Obstacles to peace: Water

The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land - and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land.

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute - moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel's main source of drinking water.

[Part of a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles.]

East African Water Clash Slams Nile Treaty

In a debate that may lead to confrontation between Egypt and eastern Africa nations over the River Nile, Kenya's members of parliament have voiced concern over the legality of an international treaty that bars the three countries from using water from Lake Victoria for irrigation.

WEB SCRUBBED

Peter Hayes, prominent Melbourne QC found naked and unconscious in an Adelaide hotel room, died four days later of a likely drug overdose.
Mystery surrounds prominent QC's death

Mr Hayes, 54, who had been entertaining two female escorts, was found naked and unconscious by his ex-bikie client Tony Sobey last Friday.
The lawyer was in Adelaide to represent Mr Sobey in a Federal Court case over a failed investment scheme.

WEB SCRUBBED:

Yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald story linked to the following Google Search result included a reference to a circa 2002 accusation of Hayes as being an "inveterate cocaine user".
The story said the bar association threw out the claim as "vexatious" and said that the solicitor was attempting to bring the profession into disrepute.
The story has scrubbed any mention of that episode.

Mystery surrounds prominent QC's death - National - smh.com.au
A spokeswoman for the Royal Adelaide Hospital would confirm only that Mr ... A solicitor once accused Mr Hayes of being an "inveterate cocaine user" but the ...
www.smh.com.au/news/national/mystery-surrounds-prominent-qcs-death/2007/05/22/1179601399958.html - 22 May 2007

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Professor James P. Kennett

Ice Age blast 'ravaged America'

A controversial new idea suggests that a large space rock exploded over North America 13,000 years ago.

The blast may have wiped out one of America's first Stone Age cultures as well as the continent's big mammals such as the mammoth and the mastodon.

The blast, from a comet or asteroid, caused a major bout of climatic cooling which may also have affected human cultures emerging in Europe and Asia.

[Scientists will outline their evidence - which comes from layers of sediment at more than 20 sites across North America - this week at a meeting in Mexico.]

SNOUTS IN TROUGHS

Opposition questions Government renovations

The Opposition may have tried in vain to use Senate Estimates Hearings for questions on the AWB kickbacks scandal, but it did get answers about some controversial Government spending measures, like the $25,000 spent replacing the wrong shade of carpet in the Cabinet suite.

Questions were also asked about $52,000 spent sound-proofing the doors to the Prime Minister's office and a $200,000 project to upgrade the Prime Minister's dining room.

[The $200,000 figure is a September 2005 "rough estimate" By late 2006 it was closer to half a million.]

PM scraps plan for $540,000 dining room

A Senate estimates committee today heard that the rough estimate for the building work alone had come in at $475,000 - enough to buy a house in most capital cities.
ut late today, a spokesman for Mr Howard said the work would not go ahead.

More than $65,000 has already been spent on architect and consultant fees for the extension, a Senate estimates committee heard today.

Senate President Paul Calvert had refused to table the document outlining the estimated cost, accusing Labor senators John Faulkner and Penny Wong of wanting to make a “cheap headline”.

“There's nothing cheap about this headline, I'll tell you. This is $475,000 plus consultants' fees of $65,000, plus the furniture and refurbishment. That's no cheap headline Senator Calvert,” Senator Faulkner said.

THE QUICKENING

BULLETIN #070520: It's happening faster than we thought

All the ominous predictions we heard about climate changes are now showing data indicating the effects are faster or more marked. And check out what's happening to the bees too.

EARTH CHANGES

Polar ocean 'soaking up less CO2'

One of Earth's most important absorbers of carbon dioxide (CO2) is failing to soak up as much of the greenhouse gas as it was expected to, scientists say.

The decline of Antarctica's Southern Ocean carbon "sink" - or reservoir - means that atmospheric CO2 levels may be higher in future than predicted.

These carbon sinks are vital; they mop up excess CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down global warming.

[The study, by an international team, is published in the journal Science.]

BIBLE BASHING

Bible accused of obscenity in Hong Kong

A Hong Kong decency watchdog had been flooded with obscenity complaints about the Bible.

The Television and Entertainments Licensing Authority (TELA), which oversees the publishing industry, said it had received 208 complaints that text within the holy book was indecent.

TELA refused to divulge details of the complaints, but local media reported that they referred to acts of violence, rape and cannibalism reputedly contained in the Old and New  Testaments.

[Reports speculated that the sudden flurry of messages sent to TELA was sparked by a Chinese-language website which had exhorted readers to pressure TELA to reclassify the Bible as an indecent publication.]

COLD CALLING

© abk.

IRONY CLAD

Zimbabwe to lead UN commission on Sustainable Development


Western countries have expressed disappointment at the decision to elect Zimbabwe to lead the United Nations (UN) Commission on Sustainable Development.

The German representative, Sigmar Gabriel, said on behalf of the European Union that because of Zimbabwe's poor human rights record and its chronic economic decline, the result would have a negative impact on the commission's credibility.
United States diplomats agree the whole credibility of one of the commissions is now in question.

EARTH CHANGES

Charity warns of migration crisis

The effects of climate change could make at least one billion people homeless between now and 2050, says a charity body.

In a report to mark the start of Christian Aid week, the charity says that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world.

Billions face climate change risk

Billions of people face shortages of food and water and increased risk of flooding, experts at a major climate change conference have warned.

L RON HOOVER

Scientologists stalk BBC investigator

"Rosemary", who is an ordinary mum and lives in England. She had two children and one died. Her surviving daughter was also her best friend.

Then her daughter joined Scientology and her mother saw less and less of her.

Almost two years ago she received a "disconnect" - a letter cutting her mother out of her life totally.
Rosemary received no Christmas cards, no birthday cards, no Mother's Day cards.
Rosemary said Scientology was a cult. It was one of the most moving and shocking interviews I have ever done.
Out of the blue, three hours after we left, her daughter came round for the first time in almost two years seeking a reconciliation. The next day she begged her mum not to use the interview. So we won't.

[Did they send the daughter round, specifically to kill the interview?]


Scientology is a pay-as-you-go religion - which is one of the reasons why the Charity Commission in Britain does not class it as a religion.
When you have paid as much as £100,000, you get to Operating Thetan Level Three and learn about "The Incident".
L Ron wrote that 75 million years ago an intergalactic space alien lord called Xenu kidnapped Thetans to earth, dumped them in volcanoes and blew them up with atomic bombs.
Ex-Scientologists have insisted to me that Xenu is part of Scientology. If so, it is a religion that requires its followers not to tell others about its core belief, which is very odd.
Critics say that if we all knew about Xenu, then Scientology could not charge people as much as £100,000 to find out about him.

SEA CHANGE

© abk.

The Guardian (early Oct 2005)

FEEL GOOD

Uploaded by KiWiTa [http://flickr.com/photos/kiwita/]

MUTANT RACE

Emergency GM law slammed

New emergency powers that allow Australian authorities to fast-track the release of genetically modified (GM) organisms, could pose unacceptable risks, say critics.

According to a Bill passed by the Senate this week, the Federal Health Minister could hypothetically order the rapid approval of a GM vaccine to fend off a possible bird flu pandemic, or a GM bacterium to 'eat' an oil spill threatening the environment.

But critics are concerned that emergency powers in The Gene Technology Amendment Bill 2007 could lead to inadequately tested GM organisms being released into the environment.

"There's a very real danger that the cure could be worse than the disease," said Australian Greens senator Rachel Siewert. "We do not want to create another cane toad."

SUFFER THE CHILDREN

Report: Iraq child mortality rate soars

The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

OUR COSMOS

Star dies in brightest supernova

A massive star around 150 times the size of the Sun has exploded in what is the brightest supernova ever seen, Nasa scientists have said.

The supernova star, called SN 2006gy, was originally discovered in September last year.

The explosion peaked for about 70 days, during which it is thought to have shone about five times more brightly than any supernova seen in the past.

"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," Alex Filippenko, one of the Nasa-backed astronomers observing the phenomenon, said.

[Supernovae occur when huge, mature stars effectively run out of fuel and collapse in on themselves.]

THINK TANK

© abk.

OIL WARS

Bush vetoes troop withdrawal Bill

AP - President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq Tuesday night in a historic showdown with Congress over whether the unpopular and costly war should end or escalate.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Senators wary of Bush's wiretap proposal

Citing FBI abuses and the attorney general's troubles, senators peppered top Justice and intelligence officials Tuesday with skeptical questions about their proposal to revise the rules for spying on Americans.

BIG END

Stakeholders reject Murdoch's Dow Jones bid

The family that owns a controlling stake in the publishers of the Wall Street Journal has rejected an unsolicited bid for the company by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Publishers and financial news wire service Dow Jones issued a statement saying that a majority of the Bancroft family was rejecting the offer.

Mr Murdoch's News Corporation has offered $60 a share for Dow Jones, which values the company at $6 billion.

Mr Murdoch said he was prepared to be patient. "It's a generous offer," he said.

Media analysts say News Corporation is looking to launch a 24-hour business news channel later this year.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Arctic melt faster than forecast

Arctic ice is melting faster than computer models of climate calculate, according to a group of US researchers.

The scientists suggest forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be too cautious.

The latest observations indicate that Arctic summers could be ice-free by the middle of the century.

"Somewhere in the second half of the century, it would happen," said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado.

Dr Scambos co-authored the latest study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with other scientists from NSIDC and from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), also in Boulder, Colorado.

They also calculate that about half, if not more, of the warming observed since 1979 originates in humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases.

POLICE STATE

Govt flags retroactive legislation to stop Hicks profits

The Federal Government says it is prepared to do everything in its power to prevent convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks from profiting from any book deal.

Some in the legal fraternity, including Melbourne civil liberties lawyer Robert Richter QC, say gaps in the Proceeds of Crime Act might allow Hicks to make a substantial amount of money from a book about his time as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

But Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says the Government will bring in retrospective legislation if this is found to be the case.

"We're not trying to stop [anyone] from trying to sell their story but we are saying you can't profit from it.

"What we've seen is that there are some lawyers out there arguing that they may be able to find technical difficulties with the legislation," he said.

"We don't believe there are any and what I'm saying is, 'look, if it's necessary to put beyond doubt that this legislation has effect, we'll do it'."

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Pressure mounting for MI5 inquiry

The MI5 security service had been watching two of the London suicide bombers - ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer - 15 months before they killed 52 people in London.

In a speech last November, the outgoing head of MI5 Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller provided a pre-emptive defence of her organisation against the criticism she knew was coming.
"I wish life were like (TV Drama) Spooks, where everything is (a) knowable, and (b) soluble by six people," she said. "We are faced by acute and very difficult choices of prioritisation.

RIGHTS TRASHED

Games 'catalyst for China abuses'

Amnesty said China had failed to keep its promise to improve human rights in the lead up to the Games.Chinese authorities have not yet commented on the report.Committee pleaThe report said the August 2008 Olympics was "a catalyst for a continued crackdown on human rights defenders, including prominent rights defence lawyers and those attempting to report on human rights violations".

BRAIN SPACE

Hawking escapes wheelchair on zero-gravity flight

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking soared into weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight that allowed the leading expert on gravity to escape his wheelchair for a brief period of time."It was amazing ... I could have gone on and on," Professor Hawking, 65, said after riding for two hours on a modified jet that flew a rollercoaster trajectory to create the impression of microgravity.

HYPER RICH

Russia's 'secret city' is lined with huge mansions

Moscow's suburb for billionaires

According to Forbes magazine Russia now has 60 billionaires. It is quite a change for a place that 15 years ago had no millionaires, let alone billionaires.

How exactly these people have got hold of such vast wealth in such a short time is a very good question, and one many ordinary Russians would like answered.

[Fifteen years ago everything in Russia was owned by the state. Today a quarter of Russia's economy is owned by 36 men.]

MYSTERIOUS FIRE

“Spontaneous” ignition blamed

Spontaneous combustion is being blamed for a small shed fire behind a business on Strathalbyn’s historic High Street last week.
The fire on Monday, April 16, caused $300 damage to two pieces of furniture held in storage after being salvaged from a major fire at the nearby Antiques Bazaar back in February.
Sergeant Mark Thomas from Hills Police said the fire was not suspicious.
“A rag soaked in linseed oil and mineral turps was left on top of a wooden cabinet and it is believed to have spontaneously combusted,” he said.

SEA GOING

'Ghost yacht' found drifting off Australian coast

Australian authorities have ended their search for the crew of a yacht found off Australia's Great Barrier Reef, saying their fate remains a mystery.

The Kaz II was found with its engine running, a laptop computer switched on sitting on a table and neatly folded clothes and sunglasses on deck, but there were no signs of any people.

The three-crew members are thought to have set sail for Townsville from Airlie Beach on Sunday.
The 12m (40 foot) catamaran was spotted by a helicopter on Wednesday, but a rescue team only reached the boat on Friday, and confirmed that there was no one aboard. An air and sea rescue operation retraced the yacht's voyage.

News Limited reports: The yacht, which had a badly torn sail, was found with its motor still running, while the vessel's dinghy remained attached.

Original item.

[Remember the Marie Celeste? Or was it the Mary Celeste?]

OUR COSMOS

The gyroscopes used in Gravity Probe B are 'the most perfect spheres ever made'.

Einstein was right, probe shows

Early results from a Nasa mission designed to test two key predictions of Albert Einstein show the great man was right about at least one of them. It will take another eight months to determine whether he got the other correct say scientists analysing data from Nasa's Gravity Probe B satellite.

One of these effects is called the geodetic effect, the other is called frame dragging. A common analogy is that of placing a heavy bowling ball on to a rubber sheet.
In the analogy, the geodetic effect is similar to the shape of the dip created when the ball is placed on to the rubber sheet.
If the bowling ball is then rotated, it will start to drag the rubber sheet around with it. In a similar way, the Earth drags local space and time around with it - ever so slightly - as it rotates.
Over the course of a year, these effects would cause the angle of spin of the gyroscopes to shift by minute amounts.

[Other experiments are due to test the equivalence principle which stems from the observation that when two objects are dropped, they will accelerate at the same rate.
"Here there is a theoretical framework where one might expect to see a departure from the equivalence principle," said Professor Sumner. "This might give us pointers as to the way forward."]

COAL-MINE CANARIES

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

Scientists suggest that mobile phone radiation (and that of other hi-tech gadgets) is responsible for the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops.
Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers.
The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

[The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing them from finding their hives. There is now evidence to back this up.]

OIL WARS

Middle East fears broken Iraq

When you travel around the Middle East and ask people about how the war in Iraq has affected them you get a combination of regret, anger and trepidation.

Meanwhile ...

On the flight deck of the enormous US aircraft carrier the USS Eisenhower in the Gulf this week, warplanes were being shot out of the steam catapults on the flight deck with engines that roared and screamed so loudly you felt it in your sinuses, teeth and jawbone.
"Listen to it," one of the officers told me when the warplanes were launched and streaking up the Gulf to Iraq.

"It is the sound of freedom."

SACRED EARTH

Sacred Mound Springs drying up due to mining

The Sacred Mound Springs are of profound cultural significance to the Aboriginal people of the region. The Arabunna people are the traditional custodians of the Lake Eyre South region, the land in which effected mound springs are located. The springs and the Artesian waters that supply them form an integral part of the communal intellectual property of the Arabunna people.

WMC refused to negotiate with the Arabunna or be party to any initiatives to preserve and protect the mound springs.

In fact, former owners WMC mounted an extensive campaign against the World Heritage nomination of the Lake Eyre Basin. It had a vested interest in preventing World Heritage nomination because of its profligate use of water from the Great Artesian Basin.

[Olympic Dam's infamy stems in part from its thirst: the mine draws around 45 million litres of water per day from the Great Artesian Basin under the surface of central Australia to process the ore.]

SKY LIGHTS

Re: Strange lights seen over southern Queensland

An Adelaide skywatcher saw something at about the same time as the Queensland phenomenon and concluded it was a malfunctioning Russian satellite.

COAL-MINE CANARIES

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." - Albert Einstein

Flowers and fruit crops facing disaster as disease kills off bees

Devastating diseases are killing off vast numbers of bees across the country, threatening major ecological and economic problems. Honeybee colonies have been wiped out this winter at twice the usual rate or worse in some areas.
The losses are the result of either Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a disease that has already decimated bee populations in the US and parts of Europe, or a new, resistant form of Varroa destructor, a parasite that attacks bees.
Experts fear that, because honeybees are responsible for 80 per cent of all pollination as they collect nectar for the hive, there could be severe ecological problems with flowers, fruit and crops failing to grow.

In London, about 4000 hives — two-thirds of the bee colonies in the capital — are estimated to have died this winter.
In the US, 50 per cent of honeybee colonies have been destroyed by CCD, while hundreds of thousands have been wiped out in Spain.
Bee-keepers in Poland, Greece, Croatia, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal have also reported heavy losses. Meanwhile, scientists at universities in Southampton and Stirling who are concerned about declining numbers of wild bumblebees — which also aid pollination — are to use dogs to search for colonies in Scotland and Hertfordshire this year.

L'AMIE

© abk.