WATER WARS

Nile states hold 'crisis talks'

The 10 states that share the Nile waters met in Uganda to discuss the future of the river. The talks came amid growing regional tensions over the world's longest river.
Egypt is reported to have said it would regard any attempt to alter the Nile status as an act of war.
The Nile is vitally important to the survival of 160 million people who share the basin in which it flows, but to Egypt the river is a matter of life and death, as the country has almost no other source of water.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Deaths of scores of mercenaries unreported

At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning $1000 a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four American murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge.
But although many of the heavily armed Western security men are working for the US Department of Defence - and most of them are former Special Forces soldiers - they are not listed as serving military personnel. Their losses can therefore be hidden from public view.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

New reports of US planting WMD In Iraq

Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country.
An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor's Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Bush coy about admitting mistakes

"I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have," he said. "I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Four times during his prime-time press conference, George W. Bush was asked whether he has made any mistakes in his presidency, whether there was anything -- his decision to invade Iraq on what turned out to be false pretenses, his failure to take decisive action in response to a memo that warned of terrorist attacks in the United States -- for which he might apologize.
Three times, Bush gave rambling responses that addressed everything but the questions presented. The fourth time, the president took a deep breath, blew it out, looked at the ground, looked at the ceiling, stalled for time, then said: "You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet."

IDENTITY DISORDER

Chip implants on the path to fashion accessory

Baja Beach Club owner Conrad Chase wanted something unique to identify his VIP patrons. Other clubs had special jewelry or key chains, but he was looking for something special. After brainstorming, he came up with the idea to implant his VIP members with VeriChip's implantable microchip.
Alex has spoken many times over the years about how the making the chip 'fun' and how by giving it an elite status soon an entire of young teenagers will be arguing with their parents demanding that they let them be implanted so that they can be in the 'in' crowd. The Baja Beach Club and Chase have proved that the trend has started.

SKY IS FALLING

Australians watching for big asteroids spot three in first month

A NASA-funded project employing Australian astronomers to watch the southern skies for asteroids cutting across Earth's path has found three in its first month.
On March 29 two asteroids were spotted whizzing by the Earth. One, about 100 metres across and travelling at 10 kilometres a second, missed the Earth by 3 million kilometres. That same night, a second, 300 metres wide and travelling at 18 kilometres a second, passed at a distance of 20 million kilometres.
On Friday a third "new" asteroid, probably 100 metres across, was spotted. It is still approaching but will miss Earth by 2.25 million kilometres next Tuesday.

[Impact damage computer for when the hot rock barbecue begins.]

BIRD BRAINS

LA Airport power failure given the bird

Officials blamed a bird on a power line for a seconds-long power failure that disrupted air traffic at Los Angeles International Airport. The power failure caused delays of 15 minutes to 90 minutes for an estimated 80 to 100 Los Angeles-bound flights, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Donn Walker said.
Apparently, a bird came in contact with the 34.5 kilovolt supply line and at the same time touched a cross-arm or some other grounded device, the DWP said in statement. The line re-energized moments later.
"We didn't find the bird on the ground, so it might have flown away," said city Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Carol Tucker.

[A bird grounded a 34,500 volt power line, and then flew away! Like that is going to actually happen]

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Americans slaughtering civilians in Falluja

An endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.
One woman and small child had been shot through the neck -- the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.
The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.

More from the Falluja atrocity:
Vengeance, time, and US idiocy
No end in sight as Fallujah death toll approaches 700
Destroying a town in order to save it
US tactics condemned by British officers

NEW WORLD ORDER

Never get in the way of a perfectly good train wreck

"FBI information ... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

- President's Daily Brief, August 6 2001

SKY IS FALLING

When the hot rock barbecue begins ...

This handy program will estimate the seismic, blast wave, and thermal effects of an impact as well as the size of the crater produced by the impact. The crater size is determined using pi-scaling.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Uncovered: A 1935 US plan for invasion of Canada

In February 1935, the War Department arranged a Congressional appropriation of $57 million dollars to build three border air bases for the purposes of pre-emptive surprise attacks on Canadian air fields. The base in the Great Lakes region was to be camouflaged as a civilian airport and was to "be capable of dominating the industrial heart of Canada, the Ontario Peninsula" from p. 61 of the February 11-13, 1935, hearings of the Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, on Air Defense Bases (H.R. 6621 and H.R. 4130). This testimony was to have been secret but was published by mistake. See the New York Times, May 1, 1935, p. 1.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Whistleblower coming in cold from the FBI

As the focus of the 911 Commission's investigations zeroes in on the crucial months and weeks prior to September 11, 2001, Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old former translator at the National Security Agency, has her turn in the spotlight. She has been trying to direct the attention of government officials and Congress to her explosive contentions. Edmonds says that a cabal of spies, associated with Turkish intelligence, was working inside the NSA listening station, where electronic messages and other sorts of "chatter" are picked up, sifted, and translated, and that they tried to recruit her.
They wanted her to refrain from translating certain taped phone conversations and other surveillance, and threatened her when she refused. In an affidavit filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ms. Edmonds testified that "investigations are being compromised, incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented.

MYSTERIOUS FIRES

Blazing mystery is straight from the ‘X-Files’

"Every time some new scientist comes to town, they arrive thinking the whole thing has been invented or that they’re going to solve the mystery in two minutes. They’ve all been wrong. Someone wrote to us saying the solution was to sacrifice a black goat and collect its blood. At some point, that’s going to start looking like a good idea.”

- Pedro Spinnato, mayor of the Sicilian town of Canneto Di Caronia, where household appliances and other inanimate objects have been bursting into flames for no apparent reason.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Rumsfeld plan to incite more terror attacks

According to a classified document prepared for US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, a new organization -- the 'Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)' -- will carry out secret missions designed to 'stimulate reactions' among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to 'counterattack' by U.S. forces.
This astonishing admission was buried deep in a Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times. There -- in an article by military analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the .

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Prober: I knew in days US 'wrong' on Iraqi WMD

The CIA's former weapons hunter in Iraq realized within days of arriving in Baghdad last summer that dictator Saddam Hussein was no longer stockpiling a banned arsenal, according to a new report.
David Kay, with whom the Bush administration placed its hopes of finding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, sent a startling E-mail to CIA Director George Tenet in early July 2003.
'I wrote that it looks as though they did not produce weapons,' Kay reveals in an interview with the new Vanity Fair."

NEW WORLD ORDER

Blix: Iraq worse off now than with Saddam

Iraq is worse off now, after the US-led invasion, than it was under Saddam Hussein, Hans Blix told a Danish newspaper Tuesday.
'What's positive is that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when figuring out the score, the negatives weigh more,' the former chief UN weapons inspector was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Jyllands Posten.
'That accounts for the many casualties during the war and the many people who still die because of the terrorism the war has nourished,' he said. 'The war has liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, but the costs have been too great.'

BODY AND SOUL

Mindfulness and happiness

Thanks to important work by Joseph LeDoux at New York University, we know that a person can be conditioned via their amygdala and thalamus to be scared of things that really aren't worth being scared of. We also know that it is extremely hard to override what the amygdala 'thinks' and 'feels' simply by conscious rational thought.
That said, there is some fascinating early work that suggests Buddhist mindfulness practice might tame the amygdala. Paul Ekman of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, a renowned researcher on basic Darwinian emotions, is, like Davidson, in the early stages of studying Buddhist practitioners. So far, he has found that experienced meditators don 't get nearly as flustered, shocked or surprised as ordinary people by unpredictable sounds, even those as loud as gunshots. And Buddhists often profess to experience less anger than most people.

PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Bush attacks environment 'scare stories'

UK's Observer newspaper has obtained a remarkable email sent to the press secretaries of all US Republican congressmen advising them what to say when questioned on the environment in the run-up to November's election. The advice: tell them everything's rosy.
It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'.
Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming.
It gives a list of alleged facts. For instance, to back its claim that air quality is improving it cites a report from Pacific Research Institute - an organisation that has received $130,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998.

[The memo directly contradicts assertions made in a secret report by the Pentagon to the White House that cities will be sunk beneath rising seas and that countries will be plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world, the report warned.]

BIG BROTHER

Protecting your privates

The Bush-Ashcroft Justice Department is attempting to force hospitals and clinics to turn over medical records on thousands of abortions.
Ashcroft claims these records will help him defend a new law prohibiting partial-birth abortions. Doctors are challenging the law on the ground that it prevents certain abortions even when they're medically necessary.
Fundamentally, Bush's claim is that the government can instruct doctors on the needs and treatment of their patients. One function of law is to set precedents. If the government has the right to dictate one aspect of medicine, and if that right is unchallenged and/or upheld, then a precedent has been set for government to dictate other medical priorities. But if government can dictate something so intimate and personal then what, according to that precedent, can it not dictate?
This being an election year, Bush been forced to flip-flop back slightly. Justice withdrew subpoenas from Planned Parenthood clinics, stating that "we will not move at this time" but might "renew our requests if necessary." For "if necessary" read "if re-elected." Hospitals are still being harassed.

[In 2000, Bush ran on a platform that loudly supported medical privacy. He has said, "I believe privacy is a fundamental right."]

CRIME AND TIME

Whistleblower to be released -- into a bigger prison

After 18 years, 11 in solitary confinement, Mordechai Vanunu is due for release on April 21. The time in solitary took its toll. There were paranoid episodes when he thought the paint colours in his cell were messages from Mossad. For three years in the early 1990s the man who spilled Israel's nuclear weapons secrets made no contact with anyone outside the prison.
Security sources have said Israel would ban him from travelling abroad after his release.