Police said Herbert Chalmers Jr. killed 53-year-old Sylvia Haynes at her apartment Tuesday morning. Hours later, he was overheard bragging about plans to kill his boss, then went to the catering company.

Chalmers and Haynes had a child together, but the state of their relationship was unclear Tuesday, police said.

One of the women killed was 79-year-old Cleo Finninger, who ran the company with her husband, Charles, said Susan Akscin, the woman's niece. The other was their adult daughter, 44-year-old Christine Politte, who oversaw payroll, authorities said. The company is on the northwest edge of St. Louis and employs about 50 people.

Both women were shot in a garage area, police said. The shooter killed himself in the parking lot.

Police and co-workers described Chalmers as a disgruntled former employee. Some workers said that he may have been angered after being told his wages would be garnisheed for child support, and that he may have been fired after failing to show up for work a day earlier.

Employee Colette Meissner said she was in the kitchen when she heard shots and the gunman screaming the names of people he intended to kill.

He shouted "Charlie," referring to Charles Finninger, Meissner said. The elderly owner was in a wheelchair, and Meissner pushed him into a walk-in cooler.

They huddled with another employee and listened as Chalmers kept shooting, Meissner said.

"I shut the door and we all stood in there and prayed," she said. "We were scared to death."

The employees who were killed were fleeing with other workers out the back of the shop, police said.

Chalmers was overheard in a Wal-Mart store bragging that he planned to shoot his boss, Brown said. Wal-Mart employees told police.

Shots were being fired at the catering company as police arrived about 1:30 p.m., Brown said. Chalmers was using a semiautomatic handgun, authorities said.

Employee Dawn Flowers, still wearing her red apron, cried as she recalled seeing Chalmers enter through a rear door carrying a duffel bag and a coat over his arm. She believed the coat was hiding the gun.

"I was hid; I was in the back cooking," Flowers said. "He came through the back door just past me."

Employee Martin Lee said Chalmers had worked at the business for a couple of years. "He seemed like a pretty nice guy," Lee said.

Greenpeace is blunt in its criticism of an earlier report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that predicted 4,000 more deaths from the accident.

"It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious nuclear accident in human history," Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Ivan Blokov said in a statement.

"Denying the real implications is not only insulting to the thousands of victims but it also leads to dangerous recommendations and the relocation of people in contaminated areas," he said.

Greenpeace says there is an urgent need to provide more - and better - information to people who are still living in affected areas and still feeling the effects of the disaster.

"It will be the fate of many future generations to suffer the echoes of Chernobyl according to inexorable statistical and biological laws," the report says.

270,000 will develop cancer, researchers say

The explosion at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, sent a plume of radioactive dust across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

The contamination drifted across Europe and affected the United States and Canada. The accumulation and the impact of the radioactivity released from the catastrophe poisoned land, air and animals.

The Greenpeace report is based on data gathered by the National Academy of Sciences in Belarus.

Researchers there believe that of the 2 billion people affected by Chernobyl disaster worldwide, an estimated 270,000 will develop cancer, and of them, 93,000 will die.

The report says that in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, the disaster has already triggered widespread death from medical conditions such as cardiovascular diseases linked to the disaster.

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters.

The protest came just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, the world's worst civilian nuclear accident. On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kiev exploded and sent a radioactive cloud across Europe.

Organisers of the rally in France said that catastrophe underlined the perils of nuclear energy, which they said would be better replaced by alternative methods.

Stéphane Lhomme, spokesman of the Sortir du Nucléaire (Get Out of Nuclear Energy) group representing 700 anti-nuclear associations, noted that more than half the reactors operational in the world today are to be shut down within two decades.

"Nuclear energy is dying, and we have to help it die in dignity, which means as fast as possible," he said.

But many activists were concerned that current sky-high oil prices and increasing energy demands in developing nations such as China and India were pushing countries to adopt nuclear power.

France remains a leader in nuclear energy production, which supplies three-quarters of its electricity output through 58 reactors dotted around the country.

The new-generation European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), a Franco-German designed plant which it plans to build in Flamanville, located in northwest Normandy, confirms its intention to further develop the industry.

Finland, too, is to build one, and several countries are already working on the next generation of reactors expected to come on line from 2030 with the goal of extending their life-spans and reducing nuclear waste.

Those taking part in the French protest warned that nuclear energy was no panacea, however, and that reduction in energy consumption was key.

"We present nuclear energy as an alternative to the problem of the greenhouse effect, but this just perpetuates the illusion that we can continue to consume (energy) like we are doing up to then," the former head of the Greens bloc in the European parliament, Paul Lannoye, said.

Lhomme agreed. "If we really want to give this planet a chance, we have to make big cuts to energy consumption, especially in the wealthy countries - the United States, western Europe and Japan. At the same time, we have to develop renewable energy sources."

Copyright AFP

Thirteen of the nation's most prominent physicists have written a letter to President Bush, calling U.S. plans to reportedly use nuclear weapons against Iran "gravely irresponsible" and warning that such action would have "disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world."

The physicists include five Nobel laureates, a recipient of the National Medal of Science and three past presidents of the American Physical Society, the nation's preeminent professional society for physicists.

Their letter was prompted by recent articles in the Washington Post, New Yorker and other publications that one of the options being considered by Pentagon planners and the White House in a military confrontation with Iran includes the use of nuclear bunker busters against underground facilities. These reports were neither confirmed nor denied by White House and Pentagon officials.

The letter was initiated by Jorge Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, who last fall put together a petition signed by more than 1,800 physicists that repudiated new U.S. nuclear weapons policies that include preemptive use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear adversaries (http://physics.ucsd.edu/petition/). Hirsch has also published 15 articles in recent months (http://antiwar.com/hirsch/) documenting the dangers associated with a potential U.S. nuclear strike on Iran.

"We are members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence, and we feel strongly that it is our professional duty to contribute our efforts to prevent their misuse," says Hirsch. "Physicists know best about the devastating effects of the weapons they created, and these eminent physicists speak for thousands of our colleagues."

"The fact that the existence of this plan has not been denied by the Administration should be a cause of great alarm, even if it is only one of several plans being considered," he adds. "The public should join these eminent scientists in demanding that the Administration publicly renounces such a misbegotten option against a non-nuclear country like Iran."

The letter, which is available at http://physics.ucsd.edu/petition/physicistsletter.html, points out that "nuclear weapons are unique among weapons of mass destruction," and that nuclear weapons in today's arsenals have a total power of more than 200,000 times the explosive energy of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, which caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people.

It notes that there are no sharp lines between small and large nuclear weapons, nor between nuclear weapons targeting facilities and those targeting armies or cities, and that the use by the United States of nuclear weapons after 60 years of non-use will make the use of nuclear weapons by others more likely.

"Once the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon again, it will heighten the probability that others will too," the physicists write. "In a world with many more nuclear nations and no longer a 'taboo' against the use of nuclear weapons, there will be a greatly enhanced risk that regional conflicts could expand into global nuclear war, with the potential to destroy our civilization."

The letter echoes the main objection of last fall's physicists' petition, stressing that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will be irreversibly damaged by the use or even the threat of use of nuclear weapons by a nuclear nation against a non-nuclear one, with disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world.

"It is gravely irresponsible for the U.S. as the greatest superpower to consider courses of action that could eventually lead to the widespread destruction of life on the planet. We urge the administration to announce publicly that it is taking the nuclear option off the table in the case of all non-nuclear adversaries, present or future, and we urge the American people to make their voices heard on this matter."

The 13 physicists who coauthored the letter are: Philip Anderson, professor of physics at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate in Physics; Michael Fisher, professor of physics at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland and Wolf Laureate in Physics; David Gross, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Kavli Institute of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nobel Laureate in Physics; Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego; Leo Kadanoff, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and recipient of the National Medal of Science; Joel Lebowitz, professor of mathematics and physics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Boltzmann Medalist; Anthony Leggett, professor of physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nobel Laureate, Physics; Eugen Merzbacher, professor of physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former president, American Physical Society; Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate, Physics; Andrew Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and former president, American Physical Society; George Trilling, professor of physics, University of California, Berkeley, and former president, American Physical Society; Frank Wilczek, professor of physics, MIT and Nobel Laureate, Physics; Edward Witten, professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study and Fields Medalist.

The physicists are sending copies of their letter to their elected representatives, requesting that the issue be urgently addressed in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Things have been getting worse recently. In the first five years of the Bush regime, federal spending increased 45%. Readers of Mises.org may remember that they were warned about Bush's fiscal irresponsibility before he took office. For comparison's sake, during the eight Clinton years nominal federal spending increased 32%, and under Bush I federal spending increased 23% in four years. In the 2000 election, Bush II promised to shovel money into all sorts of programs - and he's kept that promise.

Since 1930, in addition to the spending increases, the feds also drove prices up more than 1,100%, according to the Consumer Price Index. Also, we should suspect that these inflation numbers are low since government officials have an incentive to underestimate inflation.

If we adjust the spending numbers to account for this inflation, real federal spending is 65 times larger than it was in 1930. The US population has more than doubled since 1930 and if we take the population changes into account, real per capita spending is 27 times higher than in 1930.

In estimating real federal spending I'm not dismissing the effects of inflation, nor am I absolving the state of its complicity in driving prices up. These calculations are simply an attempt to give us some idea of the growth in government and the attendant loss of our liberties over the last several decades.

This $2.7 trillion in federal spending breaks down to $9,000 per capita or more than $36,000 for the average family of four. If we add in all state and local spending, then total government depredations (a term Murray Rothbard used to describe the greater of government spending and government receipts) are currently over $4.4 trillion or about $14,700 per person annually. Since 1959, government depredations, in real terms, have increased at an average annual rate of 4%. That kind of spending will buy a lot of votes.

A significant portion of this spending is being financed with government borrowing. In 1930, the per capita debt load was $140 per person. The current federal total debt level is $8.4 trillion, which works out to around $28,000 per person. In short, the per capita debt load is 200 times larger than it was in 1930. Adjusting for inflation, the real debt per capita is still over 16 times more than it was in 1930.

Federal government debt increased $553 billion in fiscal year 2005 alone. That's more than $1.5 billion of additional debt per day and over $1 million of borrowing per minute for every minute of the year. The interest on the debt in 2005 was $352 billion or more than $1,100 for every man, woman, and child in the country. These interest payments are roughly equal to 37% of federal income tax revenues.

Much of this debt is owed to the Federal Reserve. US taxpayers are on the hook for $758 billion of government securities that are held by the Fed. So on average, every person in the country owes the Fed about $2500.

Tax revenues and borrowing have financed all sorts of interventions. Since 1959, we have suffered from the Great Society, the war on poverty, price controls, increasingly burdensome environmental regulations, the establishment of the Department of Education and its increasing federal control over local schools, Federal Reserve created recessions, agricultural price supports, minimum wage laws, and energy policies that keep oil and gasoline prices high.

There's more. We've also had labor policies that increase the costs of hiring workers driving down their take-home pay, trade restrictions and trade agreements that give the feds control over our international trade, massive increases in the welfare state, the drug war, endless pork barrel spending, and the prosecution of businessmen for political gain. There have also been the wars to extend the US empire, from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War. A partial list of the other military interventions would include conflicts in Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. I could go on, but you get the idea.

One way to see the harm of government intervention is to realize its effects on our standard of living. The depredations of the state reduce the incentives to be productive, destroy our capital base, and have a negative effect on economic growth. From 1959 to 2005, adjusting the numbers using the implicit price deflator, real Gross Domestic Product increased an average of 3.37% annually.

Consider the possibility that government interventions reduced real economic growth 1% annually during this time. If there had been an additional 1% per year economic growth since 1959 then real GDP would currently be 55% higher than it is. The 2005 GDP of $12,479 billion would have been $19,342 billion. The median family income is estimated to be $44,389. A proportionate increase in this statistic results in a median income of $68,800.

In this scenario, a worker with a salary of $44,389 who is losing 35% of his salary to taxes has a tax liability of $15,536. After paying the various types of taxes he gets to keep only $28,853 of his salary. With the extra 1% growth per year since 1959, if that worker represented the average, his gross salary would be $68,800 and he would get to keep all of it.

Higgs on the enemy: $19
It is conceivable that the $4.4 trillion of annual depredations could have caused more than 1% annual damage to our economic growth since 1959. What are the implications of a 2% negative impact on GDP? If the absence of interventions had added an additional 2% annual growth, this would have resulted in 141% more output today. The 2005 GDP would have been over $30 trillion and the median family income would now be $107,000. The worker described above with the $44,389 gross salary and the $28,850 of after tax pay, would have an income of $107,000. The depredations have reduced his net income by 73%.

The point here is that we cannot precisely know the magnitude of the damages that intervention has on the economy but we do know that those damages compound over time, resulting in significant negative effects on our prosperity.

Those of us making the case for liberty have logic, history, and morality on our side. Government intervention is immoral and should be stopped for that reason alone. However, the economic costs of the intervention are also important. Part of the appeal of freedom is that it leads to tremendously higher standards of living and these numbers show that government interventions that cause seemingly small amounts of harm, over time, impoverish a society.

An article in the journal Geology by researcher Robert Dziak describes the findings. Dziak is an associate professor at Oregon State University who also works for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. He's stationed at OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

Dziak's article describes both new data and a record of earthquakes going back more than a decade.

Much of the data was collected using once-secret Cold War "hydrophones" the Navy uses to track submarine movements in the Pacific Ocean. Dziak said the Navy provides controls the system of seafloor microphones and relays the data to Newport.

Dziak says the evidence is that multiple tectonic plates off the Pacific Northwest appear to be rearranging themselves.

The plates have been slowly jamming into each other. Dziak said one boundary among them appears to be turning into a fault that's more like the San Andreas Fault to the south in California. Instead of ramming together, the plates are rubbing past each other, he said.

Emphasizing that the conclusions are tentative, Dziak said the consequence could be a shortening of the fault along the Pacific Northwest, so a major earthquake wouldn't be so extensive or severe.

The rearrangement could limit the potential for a magnitude 9 earthquake, he said.

"It would still ruin our day, but it wouldn't be quite so bad," he said.

Dziak also said that the hydrophone project has turned up evidence of intense earthquake activity, intense clusters of quakes that previously had gone undetected.

These are associated with underwater volcanic activity and are like the swarms of earthquakes that can precede volcanic eruptions such as that at Mount St. Helens.

The quakes were small, on the order of magnitudes 2-4, but numerous, Dziak said, with as many as a thousand of them in a three-week period.

Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall has become something of an anthem of resistance to the massive barrier Israel is building across the
West Bank, although the lyrics have been adapted to read: "We don't need no occupation. We don't need no racist wall."

Waters himself has been unapologetic about playing in Israel, which is kept off most bands' touring schedule as a result of security fears.

"I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of (British Prime Minister)
Tony Blair's foreign policy," he told Britain's Guardian newspaper recently.

Waters split acrimoniously from Pink Floyd in the 1980s but rejoined the band for a one-off Live-8 concert last summer.

In the past, the main hurdle has been money. Bringing the inner-city schools up to par with the suburban schools will cost a lot. New schools have to be built, districts have to be paid for transferring students and special services have to be provided.

But now, Sternberg says, there's another hurdle: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We've had a reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they're concerned that if they get enough of them ... they'll become labeled as failing schools," she says.

It's a problem that many experts believe is confounding an effort to eliminate the racial achievement gap on standardized annual tests. That's because the law requires schools to demonstrate that students in specific racial, social and economic groups are making annual progress. A school fails if even one group fails. The more groups in a school, the greater chance for failure.

So the odds favor predominantly white schools in places like Fairfield County, a wealthy bedroom community that's 75 percent white and has a median family income of more than $77,000. The odds do not favor predominantly minority schools in places like Hartford, which is 73 percent minority and has a median family income of $27,000.

Wedged in a poor, gritty immigrant neighborhood, Henry C. Dwight Elementary School near downtown Hartford, defies the odds. It harks back to an earlier era of learning. Its ceilings are high, there is a fireplace in the library and students wear uniforms as they dart between classrooms.

The oldest public school in one of the nation's oldest cities, Dwight finds itself at the center of a growing national debate over whether the nation's newest education experiment is - unexpectedly - encouraging school segregation.

Dwight's population is racially and economically diverse, making its future under the law uncertain even though it is currently meeting its goals. The law stresses getting students proficient in math and reading by 2014, the school's principal, Stacey McCann, says.

"They're (federal officials) not validating the incremental successes, but we are making great gains," says McCann, who supports the law. "I believe schools ... are making gains, but they might not make the mark that has been set."

Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S.
Department of Education, said he understands the concerns but believes the accountability the new law imposes on schools will ultimately benefit all children.

And while Johnson praises the law's effort to remove the racial gap on tests, he also acknowledges the creation of groups "might generate concern. I don't want to dismiss that. But the reality is, that whoever shows up has to be taught. And the expectation is that they'll be taught well. ... Good instruction is good instruction."

The Associated Press reported Monday that states across the country are helping their public schools skirt the law's requirements by deliberately undercounting nearly 2 million mostly minority students' annual test scores in the required racial categories.

By reducing the number of scores, the schools are improving their chances of avoiding failure and the penalties that go with it. Another unintended solution, experts say, is for schools to become less diverse.

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration, that turn their backs on all efforts to admit minority kids or low-income kids into their first-rate public schools, those districts aren't going to suffer at all," said Jonathan Kozol, an educator and author of several acclaimed books on race and education.

"They're going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, works with Chicago public schools and has heard some parents complain about the treatment of inner city children when they move to suburban schools.

"I have heard that there is a resentment toward those kids because they are dragging those schools down in the lists," Radner said.

When Congress passed the landmark law in 2001, Dwight was one of Hartford's worst-rated schools and exactly the type of multiracial, underperforming school the government intended to pressure to improve.

So far, Dwight has. It has met its annual goals under the law even though it has eight special groups it must report to the government and a student population that hails from 21 countries.

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, a Hartford City Council member who as a parent in 1989 filed the desegregation case against Connecticut, said there aren't enough inner city schools like Dwight that are succeeding with diverse populations.

"The big picture?" Horton Sheff asked. "Very little has changed. The progress has been far too slow.

"This nation is increasingly becoming more colored," she said. "If we don't treat our children in a manner that will help them grow, if we continue to offer them diminished destinies, then all America will go down. The quality of life for all America will decline."

April Winterson, Dwight's literacy director, hopes the No Child Left Behind Act won't put so much pressure on schools that they can't celebrate the small daily victories that fill the wide halls and small desks at her school.

"There needs to be the idea that no child can be left behind," she said. "I think sometimes people become lethargic and don't really fight those battles to make sure that every child succeeds.

"But that would be the only thing I'm nervous about, really, is moving to that direction of focusing on one group of children because they're the ones who are going to count the most. And you want to celebrate all successes. You want to celebrate all the children's successes."