But those who were ambidextrous, at least when it came to writing, stood out.

Not only were they more likely to be bisexual, and to a lesser extent homosexual, they also reported suffering from asthma, hyperactivity and dyslexia more than individuals who were more definitive about which hand they prefer.

The study involved 255,000 people who answered questions on the BBC Science and Nature website. Participants were asked 150 questions about demographics, personality, sexuality, social attitudes and behaviours.

The study was not billed as being about left-handedness. That means it didn't attract a disproportionate number of left-handed people, who make up roughly 10 per cent of the population in North America and Europe.

It also did not ask people whether they were left- or right-handed, since people who use both tend to say they are lefties, Dr. Peters said. Instead, volunteers were asked to rate their preference for writing on a scale of one to five.

One meant they liked using their left hand and five meant they preferred their right.

Those who chose three -- about 1 per cent of the participants -- were comfortable with either hand. And they turned out to be the most interesting, Dr. Peters said.

For example, among men, only 4 per cent of right-handers and 4.5 per cent of left-handers reported that they were bisexual.

But among those who wrote with both hands that number was 9.2 per cent.

Among women, 6.2 per cent of right-handers and 6.3 per cent of left-handers reported they were bisexual, compared to 15.6 per cent among the more ambidextrous volunteers.

Dr. Peters and his colleagues, British researchers Stian Reimers and John Manning, published their findings in a recent edition of the journal Brain and Cognition.

They had no way to verify that participants were telling the truth. But they found the percentage of people who said they were left-handed, homosexual, or dyslexic mirrored the numbers found in other large studies.

Their research is the latest offering in a field full of contradictory findings.

For example, in 2000, researchers at the University of Toronto and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that being left-handed is more common among lesbians, and to a lesser extent among gay men.

Others have investigated whether being left-handed is associated with dyslexia, hyperactivity or asthma.

The ambidextrous have received much less scientific scrutiny.

Dr. Peters is ambivalent about the term, because it implies people can write equally well with both hands.

This is rare, he says, and usually people are more skilled with one hand than the other, even if they can use both.

He says it is hard to know whether baseball players who can hit both ways, such as Pete Rose or Mickey Mantle, are truly ambidextrous, or whether they have worked hard to acquire a difficult skill.

Same with soccer players who are adept at kicking the ball with both their feet, such as German Gerd Mueller.

Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova is so good with both hands that she played left-handed as a junior.

"At one point, I didn't know if I was going to play lefty or righty or both hands," she has said.

All young children experiment with both hands.

"There is a phase, that can be longer or shorter, in which the parents say, 'Oh, he's going to be left-handed,' or 'Oh, he's going to be right-handed,' " Dr. Peters said.

"In the end, it shakes down by three, four or five years and focuses on one or the other."

Left-handed kids can take longer to declare themselves, he says, but children who don't make a choice are likely to use both hands as an adult.

But a more detailed account comes from Russia. The paper Commersant puts the event in perspective saying that the flare was classified an X-9, meaning an extremely powerful event. Except for its timing which directed the energy away from earth, the flare could have disruptive effects on both electronic communications and health. But we seem to be too preoccupied with the politics of man-made global warming to pay much heed to energetic phenomena that easily dwarf anything our technology could bring to bear. Or are we being purposely being kept in the dark?

Who would have thought that Russian scientists and press are more apt to discuss events likely to influence our lives than the media in the west? Times indeed seem to be a'changing...

The largest electromagnetic energy emission in the last 30 years has been recorded on the Sun, the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute said on Thursday. This energy outburst may damage equipment of space satellites, the scientists say. Doctors warn that the emission is dangerous for those afflicted with cardiovascular illnesses as well as for healthy people.

Scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute of the Moscow State University have reported record-high emissions of electromagnetic energy on the Sun, the biggest since the 1970s. Over the past few days, the volume of sun radiation, or X9, has exceeded the normal level 1,000-fold. The scientists call this phenomenon an anomaly and say that the Sun is now in a stage when sunspots, sources of high electromagnetic radiation, are unusual. "Outbursts on the Sun like this have been extremely infrequent over the past 30 years," said Igor Nikulin of the Shternberg Institute. "What is more, we have never had a chance to observe such emissions with the sun at its minimal activity."

Here, for archive purposes, the reports:

- - -

This is the NASA release as quoted in Astronomy & Space News:

Sun unleashes major solar flare

The Sun is just past its low-point in an 11-year cycle of activity. But big eruptions can happen anytime. One just did.

A major X-9 flare erupted last week. It emanated from a large sunspot, numbered 929, which is just coming into view around the eastern limb of the Sun.

The flare lifted off the Sun and was directed away from Earth. But this sunspot will rotate toward the centre of the Sun over the next few days and could offer up more major blasts that could take direct aim at our planet, forecasters say. It may cause auroras in Tasmania later this week.

Flares of this magnitude (X-class flares are all major) can damage satellites and disrupt telecommunications on Earth. They can also threaten astronauts in space.

NASA sometimes orders astronauts aboard the International Space Station to retreat to the most well protected part of the orbiting outpost to avoid excess radiation exposure. Spacewalks are avoided during solar storms.

Sunspots are dark regions of the Sun where intense magnetic activity caps the upwelling of material from below. Sometimes a cap blows, and a visible flare results. The flares are loaded with X-rays and other radiation, all of which reaches Earth moments after the eruption and can be accompanied by a shower of protons.

These storms can arrive in moments with little warning and can be deadly. Many flares are accompanied by clouds of electrified gas called coronal mass ejections, which can slam Earth a day or so later.

Earth is somewhat shielded from solar storms, but some of the radiation leaks through our protective magnetic field. Experts say space radiation is one of the biggest threats to current and future space missions, including the effort to establish a lunar base.

NASA.

Kommersant in Russia has this report dated 8 December 2006:

Powerful Magnetic Storm Approaches the Earth

The largest electromagnetic energy emission in the last 30 years has been recorded on the Sun, the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute said on Thursday. This energy outburst may damage equipment of space satellites, the scientists say. Doctors warn that the emission is dangerous for those afflicted with cardiovascular illnesses as well as for healthy people.

Scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute of the Moscow State University have reported record-high emissions of electromagnetic energy on the Sun, the biggest since the 1970s. Over the past few days, the volume of sun radiation, or X9, has exceeded the normal level 1,000-fold. The scientists call this phenomenon an anomaly and say that the Sun is now in a stage when sunspots, sources of high electromagnetic radiation, are unusual. "Outbursts on the Sun like this have been extremely infrequent over the past 30 years," said Igor Nikulin of the Shternberg Institute. "What is more, we have never had a chance to observe such emissions with the sun at its minimal activity."

Scientists say that the first indications of increased solar activity were recorded on Monday when four sunspots appeared on the eastern part of the visible side of the solar disk. First, the scientists observed flashes on the Sun which were classified as moderate. However, the flashes were followed on Tuesday by massive outbursts of electromagnetic energy. "Such a large cloud of hot plasma has been released into space that even electronic equipment on space satellites may be damaged," Vladimir Matveev at the Moscow Aviation Institute says.

The Sun's electromagnetic anomaly has not reached the Earth yet. However, the Earth is expected to reach the sunspots quite soon. The encounter may happen this weekend, scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute report. Igor Nikulin says: "If the area of the sunspots does not diminish in three or four days and the emissions continue, it may have a serious influence on the magnetic field of the Earth." A cloud of hot plasma from the sunspots will make the Earth's magnetic field vibrate and will cause a powerful magnetic storm."

Doctors recommend their patients to keep to a special regime during the magnetic storm. People with cardiovascular illness are believed to be at a particular risk. However, quite healthy people should be on their guard as well. "One should not go overboard with drinking, going to the sauna or doing extra work," Vladimir Ryabinin, chief physician at the Sklifosovskiy Ambulance Institute, advises. Other doctors suggest that people pay close attention to their health conditions during the days of the magnetic storm and go to consult their doctors in case of any problem.

Anna Geroeva

See also:

Discovery Channel: Giant Plasma Tsunami Rolls Across Sun
A solar tsunami has been caught in the act of rolling across the face of the sun. The unusual shock wave, clocked at about 700,000 miles per hour, was triggered by a huge Dec. 6 flare that erupted from a rowdy Earth-sized sunspot during what is otherwise a relatively quiet time for the sun. "This is clearly a unique event," said Alexei Pevtsov, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. "I don't think we've ever seen a wave of that magnitude."

Pravda - Another Russian paper has a report in the Italian edition:
E' in corso la piu' potente tempesta magnetica degli ultimi 30 anni

Another mention in the Azeri (Azerbaijan) press:
Intense solar flares to damage satellites, communications systems

Nasa's latest SOHO images of the sun (as of today, 12 December 2006) say "CCD Bakeout" - available images only go up to 25 November 2006:

NASAlatest.gif

Current information: Space Weather

In addition, "we are starting to look very carefully at California," to see what the new technology might reveal about Sierra snowpack, said Jay Famiglietti, an earth system science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Later, he plans to turn his focus to the state's groundwater.

Famiglietti is one of many GRACE fans -- few can resist tossing around the word "amazing" to describe it -- who are gathering this week at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco to talk about what the system can accomplish.

"We have a new tool that can get at this completely hidden thing in the earth, and the sky's the limit in terms of applications," said Michael Watkins, project scientist for the system at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Launched in 2002, what GRACE tracks best is change -- the way the Earth's gravitational pull in the exact same spot varies from month to month.

Water is the biggest factor that changes in such a short time frame, once analysts eliminate little distractions like the weather (a high pressure system will yank at a GRACE satellite a bit more than a low pressure one).

"Water weighs a lot. As water slogs around the Earth, we track it in any form. Water in the form of ice, in the ocean, in the ground," Watkins said.

Even before the satellites went up, Watkins and others anticipated GRACE would be able to measure how quickly polar ice is melting. It came through, producing data earlier this year on the dwindling of Antarctic ice and faster-than-expected losses in Greenland.

Several researchers are looking to GRACE as a way to monitor the effects of climate change, detecting changes in sea level that could affect how ocean currents move warm water around the globe.

Such insights are possible because gravity -- a force that in daily life seems pretty uniform -- actually varies from place to place. It's affected by changes in water movement, denser or lighter structures in the Earth's mantle, denser or lighter formations above ground, such as mountain ranges, and even the way the Earth flattens at the poles, putting everything there just a bit closer to the core. (If you want to lose weight, says Watkins, go to the equator. You'll drop a tiny fraction of an ounce.)

In theory, one satellite alone would have been enough to measure those varying pulls from orbit. GRACE uses two because it was easier and cheaper to have each satellite monitor the other than to set up a huge network of ground tracking stations.

For groundwater movements, the system today works best on vast basins covering 80,000 or more square miles. But Famiglietti and colleague Matt Rodell of NASA are combining it with other water models to sharply narrow its focus, perhaps down to levels useful to local water managers.

That would be critical, said California's chief hydrologist Maury Roos, because people want to know what's going on in individual watersheds.

And while GRACE doesn't have the precision to replace river gauges or snowpack testing, the big-picture data it produces should help water watchers refine their existing models, said JPL's Watkins.

Any little bit could help.

"We've got some holes up in the high Sierras," state hydrologist Roos said, where snowpack measurements can't be taken because of wilderness rules or other restrictions.

ANOOX
www.anoox.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

The human touch - Anoox uses people power to generate search results, though of course computers come into it. It is also run on a not-for-profit basis - advertising covers its costs.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Users can join the Anoox Community and vote on the computer-generated search results. The votes are logged and help to determine the sites that are found in future. In other words, it operates via the democratic principle of majority rule.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Fully launched in April 2005, Annox was making waves as a pre-release "beta" site long before that, thanks to its focus on majority votes and advertising rates that are much cheaper than Google or Yahoo!. Based in San Francisco, most of the development for the site happens in Europe.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Anoox gives 1,826 results for "Tony Blair" and returns the list in 0.048 seconds. These are results with personality - the first is for www.newleft.net, the second for www.impeachblair.org and the third for a Blair lookalike.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

There is no option to search for images, and a request for "Tony Blair and images" seems to confuse it. It comes up with a different set of results to my earlier search but its findings aren't what I'm looking for.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

A plain site that is very basic, and the flashing circle of world flags that appears when a search is taking place is rather winning. Hi-tech fans may not be convinced.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

Socialist surfers - the not-for-profit stance may not spell the end of capitalism but the one-person, one-vote approach brings democracy to web searches.

LIVE.COM

www.live.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Live.com provides more than just web searches - here you get shopping, e-mail, blogs and the latest information from the internet, too, all in one slick but heavily branded package.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Live.com is Microsoft's MSN with a make-over. It's billed as a combination of internet software and services designed to work together to give users everything they need from one site. Live.com lets users watch out for new content on their favourite sites by providing RSS feeds.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

On 12 September 2006, Live.com officially came out of pre-release "beta" stage. In the following few days, MSN Search began redirecting to the new Windows Live Search.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Predictable but fast. A search for Happy Feet , this year's big festive film, gave a list of the usual sites and trailers, then 10,711,177 pages of stuff, plus sponsored links. Happy Feet slippers, anyone?

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

Very good. I type in "The Horrors band" and get 97 images, mostly of the group I was looking for, who are pretty small. Move the cursor over each picture and it enlarges, giving information about the size and date of the picture. There is also a list of links to related topics on the right.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

Super-smooth. Anyone used to Microsoft's other sites will feel at home. It's very user-friendly, but Mac users may struggle.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

Windows lovers, online novices, people with MSN Messenger and anyone who still has a Hotmail account.

NEWSNOW

www.newsnow.co.uk

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

One of the UK's most popular news portals, NewsNow is a provider of internet press cuttings and real-time news from over 139 countries. It also has newsfeeds on topics such entertainment, football and business.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

NewsNow automatically searches 27,310 news sources every five minutes, including international, national and regional titles, newswires and press releases.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Set up in 1997, NewsNow has more than 1.1 million users worldwide. It also offers corporate services for companies that pay to receive market intelligence and competitor tracking.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

The free service can only search single words in headlines, so "Augusto Pinochet" gives no results but "Pinochet" yields four articles from the last 10 to 15 minutes, two of which are in English. There are 30 from the past hour.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

There is no facility to search for images on NewsNow, although the websites it links to may include pictures. That said, some of the smaller organisations it links to don't seem to use pictures at all.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

The homepage of the site is busy but clear to use and read. Newsfeeds appear on the left of the page with search results in the centre.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

News junkies, students and freelance journalists. For those with corporate cash behind them, the paid-for searches are very in-depth.

QUINTURA

www.quintura.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

This is a visual search engine that returns results as a list but also as a "tag cloud". The cloud contains the search terms surrounded by related tags. The results closest to the terms are in bigger, bolder fonts.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Quintura's searches are based on advanced algorithms of artificial intelligence (neural networks). The algorithms simulate the way the of human brain works.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Powered by Yahoo, Quintura was released in November 2005. This year, new features were added, including personalised search preferences and access to other people's search scopes.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Excellent. Type in La Scala Milan , and you get 119,000 results, and the top one takes you straight to a ticket website. You may end up looking at the list rather than using the cloud.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

Not so hot. I type in "Christmas decorations Times Square" and get absolutely zero results. "Times Square" brings up 1,000, mainly old, pictures.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

It's simple to use, requires no sign-in and gives results that are comprehensive, though often off-the-wall. There are two search options, one for web searches and one for pictures - nothing too confusing here.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

Lateral thinkers who like to research around a topic and anyone who prefers a visual approach instead of merely a lists of links.

SWAMII

www.swamii.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Sorts results with the latest sites at the top. It also keeps on searching - you can build a list of "interests", and every time you visit, it displays all the new information on that subject.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Instead of just indexing web pages, Swamii interweaves sources by searching the news, television, blogs and job sites for matches.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Swamii was in a pre-release "Beta" version from 1 September and was released to the public two weeks ago. CEO Kalem Fletcher wanted to call the site Yoda.com but found that the domain name had been taken by a cat owner whose pet was called after the Jedi master. Swamii business, a corporate site, will launch next year.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Typing in "Litvinenko" gives me 336 results, the top two of which were posted online within the last minute.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

Not directly, though you do find up-to-date pictures. Handy if, say, you're looking to copy a celebrity haircut.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

The interface is straightforward and user friendly, although users have to register to use the service and enter a password each time they go on to the site.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

Anyone who wants to keep track of a current event as it unfolds, or web users who want their searches absolutely up-to-the-minute.

ASK.COM

www.ask.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

A site that allows users to type in questions written in proper sentences, rather than just using search terms.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Ask.com answers questions posed in natural language, making it perfect for web novices, and uses the popularity of subject-specific links to gauge the authority of answers.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Founded in Berkley, California, in 1996 the site started life as Askjeeves.com, offering the services of a virtual butler. In February this year, he retired.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Type in "What is the world's tallest mountain?" and 251,200 pages come back. The first tells me the answer is Everest while the second two say Mauna Kea, on Hawaii. So, not exactly fool-proof.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

It's a bit confusing, but typing in "What does the latest Aston Martin look like" brings up a picture of the car from Casino Royale.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

A simple page invites users to ask a question then either search the web or just UK pages.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

The nervous or easily frightened internet explorer. Ask.com steers clear of offering users endless services and is a gentle introduction to searching.

GOOGLE

www.google.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

The world's favourite search engine, so ubiquitous that it has its own verb. As well as web searches, Google offers images, instant messaging, news and "Froogle" shopping services, plus Google Earth, an interactive mapping service of the world, GMail free e-mail and Google Labs, a site devoted to beta-testing new products. The site even has its own shop, selling Google pens and shirts.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It's based on the idea of bibliometrics: assessing the importance of any given article or piece of information purely by measuring how often other people mention it. Google does not search the internet - it searches the index of words on webpages for the relevant terms, measures the relevance, and lists the pages, with the highest score at the top.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Google began life in January 1996 as a research project created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University, California.The domain name Google.com was registered in 1997 and has made $7.14bn in revenue this year.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

Beth Ditto is set to hit the big time soon. Google shows 344,000 results in 0.08 seconds. Sounds promising.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

A search for Zara Phillips gives me 628 hits in 0.06 seconds. It's everything a royal-watcher could want, and you can even select high, medium and low resolution images.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

Simple, uncluttered and very easy. When set as a home page, users can customise Google to give them news updates, horoscopes and weather forecasts. A site that can be as simple or as complex as your wish.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

It's the first port of call for most web users thanks to its fast, vast searches and wide range of services. Not so great for Chinese internet users, as Google has sided with the Chinese government in limiting freedom of speech in the country.

YAHOO

www.yahoo.com

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Yahoo! is reportedly the most visited website around, with more than 412 million users. Offers a range of services including e-mail.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

By buying up previously independent companies, Yahoo! has become more than a web directory. It uses a free web-hosting service from GeoCities, and has partnerships with BT and AT&T.

HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?

Started life in California in March 1995. It was originally called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", but became Yahoo! shortly afterwards and was launched to the public in April 1996. Was the No 1 search engine until Google stole its thunder.

HOW DOES IT PERFORM?

A search for "Nintendo Wii" returns 62,200,000 hits in 0.03 seconds. The first is a link to a Yahoo! site where people can try (and probably fail) to buy a Wii console, the second is Nintendo's site and the third is Wikipedia.

CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?

Looking for a picture of Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa brings up 19,155 results. The first page gives me what I need.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

Easy to use with a list of search options - including photos and sport - and links to Yahoo! mail and instant messaging.

WHO'S IT BEST FOR?

Like its arch-rival Google, Yahoo! isn't always the friend of democracy - it has also failed to challenge censorship in China. For everyone else, Yahoo! offers a reliable if unexciting way to navigate the internet.

Ukraine has become the self-styled stem cell capital of the world.

There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases.

But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies.

Wall of silence

The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.

In 2003 the authorities agreed to exhume around 30 bodies of foetuses and full-term babies from a cemetery used by maternity hospital number six.

One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.

In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.

The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.

A senior British forensic pathologist says he is very concerned to see bodies in pieces - as that is not standard post-mortem practice.

It could possibly be a result of harvesting stem cells from bone marrow.

Hospital number six denies the allegations.

The parliamentarians overwhelmingly approved the legislation on its second reading by a majority of 529 votes for and 98 against, ending more than three years of lobbying and political wrangling.

The main groups in the Strasbourg assembly -- the conservatives, socialists and liberal democrats all voted in favour, while the greens opposed the measures for being too favourable to industry.

After the vote, a beaming parliamentary rapporteur, Italian MEP Guido Sacconi, was handed a bouquet of flowers amid warm applause.

The so-called REACH regulation (registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals) will oblige companies to register all chemicals they use and provide information about them as well as any potential hazards.

It means that companies will now shoulder the burden of proving that their chemicals are safe. The current 40-year-old system has obliged public authorities to prove that such products are dangerous.

Of the estimated 100,000 substances on the European market, only those introduced since 1981 -- a mere 3,000 or so -- have been studied for their nocive effects.

The European Union's Finnish presidency applauded the yes vote.

"This is a historic day," said Finnish Trade and Industry Minister Mauri Pekkarinen.

"The chemicals regulation will reform the entire EU chemicals legislation and will turn Europe into a global forerunner and trailblazer," he said.

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said REACH "will increase our knowledge about chemicals, enhance safety, and spur innovation while encouraging substitution of highly dangerous substances by safer ones."

But an alliance of environmental and women's groups said the final package was only a modest step in the direction of what was needed, and still contained loopholes that the chemicals industry could jump through.

"Major loopholes in REACH will still allow many chemicals that can cause serious health problems -- including cancer, birth defects and reproductive illnesses -- to continue being used in manufacturing and consumer goods." they said in a statement.

Greens MEP Caroline Lucas said: "This deal is an early Christmas present for the chemicals industry, rewarding it for its intense and underhand lobbying campaign."

"While the legislative text has been agreed, the devil will be in the detail of the implementation of these rules," she said.

Indeed the industry, led by German giant BASF, did push hard.

But non-governmental organisations also lobbied in spectacular fashion, at one stage taking blood tests of parliamentarians to show the presence of toxic substances even after they had been banned.

"We regret the unnecessary requirements added to the authorisation element of REACH," said Alain Perroy, head of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), in a statement.

"The European chemical industry will see REACH as an opportunity to demonstrate that companies have a solid knowledge of chemicals and strong product management practices to ensure chemical safety," he said.

Europe's main consumer group BEUC generally welcomed the text itself but worried about how it would be implemented.

"The adoption of REACH is not the end of the story: what has been agreed must now be implemented properly and we will actively monitor the situation," warned director Jim Murray.

"The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild," said August Pfluger, a Swiss economist turned amateur naturalist who helped put together the expedition. "We are all incredibly sad."

The baiji dates back 20 million years. Chinese called it the "goddess of the Yangtze." For China, its disappearance symbolizes how unbridled economic growth is changing the country's environment, irreparably, some environmentalists say.

The damage to the baiji's habitat is also affecting the Yangtze finless porpoise, whose numbers have fallen to below 400, the expedition found.

"The situation of the finless porpoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago," the group said in a statement citing Wang Ding, a hydrobiologist and co-leader of the expedition. "Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second baiji."

Pfluger said China's Agriculture Ministry, which approved his expedition, had hoped the baiji would be another panda, an animal brought back from the brink of extinction in a highly marketable effort that bolstered the country's image.

The expedition was the most professional and meticulous ever launched for the mammal, Pfluger said. The team of 30 scientists and crew from China, the United States and four other countries searched a 1,700-kilometer (1,000-mile) heavily trafficked stretch of the Yangtze, where the baiji once thrived.

The expedition's two boats, equipped with high-tech binoculars and underwater microphones, trailed each other an hour apart without radio contact so that a sighting by one vessel would not prejudice the other. If there was fog, he said, the boats waited for the mist to clear to make sure they took every opportunity to spot the mammal.

Around 400 baiji were believed to be living in the Yangtze in the early 1980s, when China was just launching the free-market reforms that have transformed its economy. The last full-fledged search, in 1997, yielded 13 confirmed sightings, and a fisherman claimed to have seen a baiji in 2004, Pfluger said in an earlier interview.

At least 20 to 25 baiji would now be needed to give the species a chance to survive, Wang, the Chinese scientist, said.

For Pfluger, the baiji's demise is a personal defeat. A member of the 1997 expedition, he recalls the excitement of seeing a baiji cavorting in the waters near Dongting Lake.

"It marked me," he said in an interview Monday. He went on to set up the baiji.org Foundation to save the dolphin. In recent years, Pfluger said, scientists like the eminent zoologist George Schaller told him to stop his search, saying the baiji's "lost, forget it."

During the recent expedition, an occasional online diary kept by team members traced a dispiriting situation, as day after day they failed to spot a single baiji.

Even in the expedition's final days, members believed they would find a specimen, trolling a "hotspot" below the industrial city of Wuhan where Baiji were previously sighted, Pfluger said. "Hope dies last," he said.

Those infected all ate at the three restaurants in roughly the same time period, the last few days of November and the first few days of December, said Kirk Smith, supervisor of the Minnesota Department of Health's food borne disease unit.

Separately Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said its analysis had shown so far that "onions of any type are probably not linked to this outbreak."

On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it could not confirm that scallions were the cause of the problem, as previously suspected, and that it was not ruling out any food as a possible culprit.

Meanwhile, Taco Bell Corp. launched a newspaper ad blitz and sent its president on a string of media interviews Tuesday to persuade customers that its food is safe - even as the cause of the E. coli outbreak linked to the fast-food chain remained a mystery.

In an open letter to customers published in USA Today, The New York Times and other newspapers, Taco Bell President Greg Creed said he would support the creation of a coalition of food suppliers, competitors, government and other experts to explore ways to safeguard the food supply chain and public health.

On Tuesday, all but four of Taco Bell's 86 New Jersey restaurants were back in business.

Half of the 14 Minnesota victims ate at the Albert Lea restaurant, the other half in Austin, Smith said. He said he wouldn't be surprised to see at least a few more cases crop up in the next day or two.

Taco John's spokesman Brian Dixon identified the produce supplier for the three restaurants as St. Paul-based Bix Produce. But he stressed that the restaurant chain doesn't yet know if the produce was the source of the E. coli. The disease can also be carried by undercooked meat, and Dixon said the chain is testing samples of all types of food from the restaurants in question.

"We're still trying to pinpoint exactly what happened," Dixon said. The company may decide to switch suppliers, he said.

Bix Produce Chief Operating Officer Duane Pfleiger stressed that produce has not been implicated in the illnesses and that the investigation is ongoing.

"There is no conclusive evidence pointing toward produce or any other item that might be the cause of this," he said, adding that Bix Produce has a strong safety record.

E. coli is a common, usually harmless bacteria, but certain strains can cause abdominal cramps, fever, bloody diarrhea, kidney failure, blindness, paralysis, even death.

It is found in the feces of humans and livestock. The germs can be spread by people if they do not thoroughly wash their hands after using the restroom.

Five of the Minnesota cases have been confirmed as E. coli at local hospitals, Smith said, but the Department of Health plans to make its own confirmation in each case. He said DNA testing will also be used to independently confirm that the Minnesota and Iowa contaminations came from the same source.

One of the Minnesota victims has developed kidney complications and has been hospitalized, Smith said.

In the Iowa cases, preliminary test results showed that E. coli was the likely culprit for symptoms that sickened about 40 people and sent 18 people to the hospital in late November and early December.

The restaurants in Albert Lea and Austin have remained open. Both sites threw out their entire food supplies, and Dixon said both are entirely replacing their produce stock every four hours. He said the company has also sent in a trainer to check on restaurant conditions.

The company also said it has taken steps to sanitize equipment at the restaurants in question.

Dixon said employees company-wide are being reminded of the company's "well-defined safety standards" including cooking temperatures, hand-washing and other personal health requirements.

"We're taking every possible aggressive posture we can," Dixon said. "It's sickening for us to see anybody in the public suffer in this way, especially if they got ill from eating at Taco John's."

Just a handful of people were eating at a Taco John's in St. Paul during the lunch hour Tuesday. Gary Hanson, a Taco John's regular in town on business, made a cross with his index fingers and pointed inside the restaurant when asked about the E. coli outbreak.

"That's why nobody's here," he joked. But he said he wasn't too worried, as he dug into his chicken fajitas.

"They're probably more cautious than they ever were," he said.

Federal health officials say there's still no indication that the outbreak in Minnesota and Iowa is connected to an outbreak in the Northeast that sickened 64 people who ate at Taco Bell restaurants, but they haven't ruled out a link. Scallions were initially identified as the likely source of that outbreak, but federal testing of samples turned up negative for E. coli.

The two taco chains are not affiliated with each other.

Who has real power over U.S. decision-making?

If you think it is the White House, or even the Congress, think again. There has been a power shift underway for years and, believe it our not, our future and fortune rest in the hands of bureaucrats on the other side of the world. Sorry folks, but our red, white and blue economy is afloat today because of help from members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yes, the Red Menace that we spent so many years fearing as a military threat now represents a far more serious economic threat. Mao must be turning in his grave with the news that no less than six U.S. Cabinet Ministers are on their way this week to the Middle Kingdom to beseech, beg, lobby and try to persuade the new mandarins not to sell off their vast reservoir of dollars.

There's an old saying that a person can be in trouble when he owes a bank $100. But if he owes $l00 million, the bank could be in trouble. We owe China billions but they realize that collapse of American capitalism -- once their revolutionary goal -- could also trigger a collapse of Chinese "communism." That's how mutually intertwined we have become, and how complicit we are with a government which the Committee to Protect Journalists says now jails more journalists than any other.

The New York Times reports on the big trip later this week that will bring Treasury Secretary and company on their ballyhooed 'excellent adventure' to Beijing. Yet it doesn't look like much will happen.

"As Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. prepares for his passage to China with six Cabinet members and the chairman of the Federal Reserve," reports the New York Times, "pressure is mounting on him to produce results or face a wave of protectionist measures in the new Congress next year.

"Mr. Paulson conferred this week with business leaders urging him to bring about changes in China's economic practices, particularly its regulated economy, manipulation of currency levels to spur exports and its failure to crack down on piracy of software, pharmaceuticals and other items.

At the same time, Mr. Paulson 's aides were also conferring with Chinese representatives preparing for his Dec. 13-15 trip. Both sides cautioned not to expect breakthroughs on the big issues, in part because the Chinese cannot be seen as kowtowing to American pressure."

So we will hear a lot of rhetoric in the days to come about China's failures to honor agreements and violations of trade regimes. They will all be true -- but beside the point. Who has the power to bring China into line? We don't. We are as much of a paper tiger in Beijing as we are in Baghdad.

The Financial Times reports that "Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a recent interview: 'There are constituencies and vested interests. You can't deal with the Chinese by banging on the table, going to the balcony and saying, 'This is what I want.' "

What's really going on? It looks like this could be the opening stages of a new war, a trade war, revolving in part around the shrinking power of the dollar.

And that war could do more damage to the United States than the defeat in Iraq.

Already, as I have reported, the Treasury Department has opened a global crisis management center that sounds very much like an economic war room. It is headed by none other than Jim Wilkinson, the GOP info warrior who ran the Coalition Media Center during the opening days of the Iraq War, when great victories were all we read about in the news.

What we are not reading today is how serious this is. And how our national and consumer debt is at the center of it.

Reports the Economist, "America's growth has been driven by consumer spending. That spending, supported by increased BORROWING, is clearly UNSUSTAINABLE; and the consequent economic and financial imbalances must INVARIABLY UNWIND. As that happens, the country could face a PROLONGED period of slower growth." (Emphasis mine.)

The bill is coming due. The piper will be paid. And all the financial wonks and gnomes and commissars worldwide know it. In many quarters, the Euro looks like a better bet than the dollar. Why? The Economist says productivity growth is going down in the United States and up in Europe. The U.S. structural budget deficit has widened and American savings has disappeared into the negative column.. Their cover story speaks of illusions in Washington. Sound familiar?

A slump in the American economy is likely to be cushioned by banks and investors overseas because it could bring them down too, What this means is that we are DEPENDENT on what others do or fail to do. Washington is actually undermining the dollar in hopes it will make our exports cheaper and thus ease the deficit. It's our way of pressuring the Chinese and try to get them lower the value of their currency.

Clever? Don't be so sure. They are not fools.

If China's wise men decide that propping up the dollar is not in their interest, they can move more money into Euros. And then the real battle begins. Already their Finance Minister said they are "diversifying" their currencies. That's not in "our interest" and yet our monetary manipulations could backfire as Robert Sinche of the Bank of America suggests. Listen to this:

"Let's say China revalues by 10 percent overnight. The prices at Wal-Mart go up ten percent. So we then see worse inflation, the Fed tightens monetary policies and we end up with higher inflation, higher prices and higher interest rates. Remind me again why that's what we want."

Forget the Beijing Olympics. This is the real game in town, a battle fought with calculators and strategy. We are playing Monopoly. They are playing GO, the game created in Asia 4,000 years ago.

So if you didn't trust this Administration on the war, why should you trust them on economics? When you know the war casualty figures have been downplayed, why do you think the jobless figures and "misery index" are not? Would you give your money and your destiny over to con men? Of course not, if you knew what the con is.

Unfortunately, the real news about these manipulations is buried in the labyrinth of business sections where many are afflicted by the economics "MEGO" effect. (MEGO stands for 'My Eyes Glaze Over.)

So that's why its time to pay attention to the dropping dollar, the impending diplomatic China dance, and the domestic housing "train wreck," as experts call it. All feed into a global credit crunch affecting us all. We urgently need our media to track these developments and explain them more clearly with less of a big business bias and more of a "who wins and who loses" framework.

While we watch one war go up in flames, the matches are being lit for another one.

Danny Schechter writes a blog for MediaChannel.org. He is the author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq" (Prometheus).

I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering why my spam looks the way it does. Until quite recently, I received about 20,000 spam e-mails every day. The poor little Bayesean filter in my Thunderbird e-mail program couldn't keep up and would routinely barf when confronted with such huge piles of crap from "Nuclear R. Accomplishment" with the subject line "$subject" and a message body full of random quotes from Beowulf.

Before I finally fixed my spam problem -- oh blissfully small inbox! -- I developed a few vaguely paranoid theories. Briefly, I imagined spammers were spying on my inbox and culling sender names from it that matched those of my friends. In my saner moments, I would wonder why exactly spam evolved to look the way it does. Why do spammers keep sending me pictures of pink, bouncy letters that spell "mortgage," followed by text from a random Web site? And why, oh why, do they send me e-mails containing nothing but the cryptic line, "he said from the doorway, where she"? How can that be good business sense?

So I called expert Daniel Quinlan, who is an antispam architect at Ironport Systems as well as a contributor to open-source antispam system Spam Assassin. He patiently listened to me rant about my e-mail problems -- I think antispam experts are sort of like geek therapists -- then explained why I receive spam from random dictionary words strung together into a name like Elephant Q.

Thermodynamic. It's done to fool any spam filter that refuses to receive e-mail from somebody who has already sent you spam in the past. "They want to create a name that your spam filter has never seen before," Quinlan said. It turns out every weirdness in my spam is "probably there for a good reason," he said. In the arms race between spammers and antispammers, spammers try every trick they can to circumvent filtering software.

Often, the spam you get is the result of months or years of this arms race. For example, spammers of yesteryear started sending images instead of text, so that spam filters looking for text like "viagra" would be fooled. Instead, the image would contain the word "viagra," but filters would see only an image and let it through. In response, antispam software began tossing e-mails that contained only an image, since spam containing an image typically has some text with it like "check out my pictures from Hawaii" or whatever. Rarely does a real person send just an image.

Quinlan said spammers figured out their pictures were being chucked, so they started adding a few random words to their mail and got through the filters again. Then antispammers started chucking e-mails with images that also contained random words that didn't make sentences. And that's why, today, you get images with chunks of text taken from random books and Web sites. As long as the text fits into sentences and isn't random words strung together, spam filters have a harder time figuring out if the mail is spam or ham. Spammers also send slightly different images every time, so that spam filters can't identify the image itself as spam. And they fill the images with bouncy, pink letters advertising their crap because character recognition software can't read bouncy letters. So any spam filter that uses character recognition software to look at text in images to find spam will be fooled.

OK, so there is a reason behind the madness. But how could Quinlan explain the spam I get that contains no advertisement for anything, no links nor images, and instead merely quotes some random passage from Dostoyevsky? Quinlan said there's no way to know for sure, but the reigning theory among antispam experts is that it's part of what's called a "directory harvest attack" in which the spammer tries to figure out if there's a real person behind a randomly chosen e-mail address. The spammer sends out millions of innocuous e-mails and may get a slightly different response from the mail server if the mail has reached an actual person. Once the spammer has established that certain addresses are valid, he can send his real spam and be sure that he's reaching an inbox.

All of this sounds perfectly reasonable. Spammers are doing bizarro things to get their messages out. But why do I sometimes get a spam with the subject line "$subject"? Why would I ever be fooled into thinking that was a piece of legitimate e-mail? "That's just some spammer who doesn't know how to use his spamware," Quinlan said. "Sometimes spammers do things that are -- for lack of a better word -- dumb."

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who is in recovery from receiving spam.