- Signs of the Times for Tue, 11 Apr 2006 -

• Signs Editorials
• Israel - Murderous Intent
• The Evils of Economic Excess
• War Is Fun!
• Homeland Hysteria
• Pharma Fascism
• Sock Puppet Bush
• European Disarray
• Cosmic Conundrums
• Worldy Weirdness

The story of what happened to Yaseen and his brother Younes' family has redefined Haditha's relationship with the Marines who patrol it. On Nov. 19, a roadside bomb struck a Humvee on Haditha's main road, killing one Marine and injuring two others.

The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes' house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.

Eight were from Younes' family. The only survivor, Younes' 13-year-old daughter, said her family wasn't shooting at Marines or harboring extremists that morning. They were sleeping when the bomb exploded. And when the Marines entered their house, she said, they shot at everyone inside.

The Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an investigation in February after a Time Magazine reporter passed on accounts he had received about the incident. A second investigation was opened into how the Marines initially reported the killings - the Marines said that 15 people were killed by the roadside explosion and that eight insurgents were killed in subsequent combat.

On Friday, the Marines relieved of duty three leaders of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which had responsibility for Haditha when the shooting occurred. They are Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. McConnell was commanding Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, the unit that struck the roadside bomb on Nov. 19 and led the subsequent search of the area.

The Marines' announcement didn't tie the disciplinary actions directly to Haditha, saying only that Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, had lost confidence in the officers' ability to command.

They were relieved because of "multiple incidents that occurred throughout their deployment," said Lt. Lawton King, a spokesman at the Marines' home base at Camp Pendleton, Calif., to which they recently returned. "This decision was made independent of the NCIS investigation."

The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.

She fainted after the Marines burst through the door and began firing. When she regained consciousness, only her 3-year-old brother was still alive, but bleeding heavily. She comforted him in a room filled with dead family members until he died, too. And then she went to her Uncle Yaseen's house next door.

Neither Yaseen nor Safa have returned home since.

Indeed, many in this town, whose residents are stuck in the battle between extremists and the Americans, said now it is the U.S. military they fear most.

"The mujahadeen (holy warriors) will kill you if you stand against them or say anything against them. And the Americans will kill you if the mujahadeen attack them several kilometers away," said Mohammed al-Hadithi, 32, a barber who lives in neighboring Haqlania. With a cigarette between his fingers, he pointed at a Marine patrol as it passed in front of his shop. "I look at each of them, and I see killers."

Haditha, a town of about 100,000 people in Anbar province, undeniably is an insurgent bastion. Around the time of the attack, several storefronts were lined with posters and pictures supporting al-Qaida, although residents said they posted them to appease extremists.

[Ed: we wonder who these "extremists" are that want to force ordinary Iraqis to associate themselves with 'al-Qaeda']

Insurgents blend in with the residents, setting up their cells in homes next to those belonging to everyday citizens, some of them supportive.

There is no functioning police station and the government offices are largely vacant. The last man to call himself mayor relinquished the title earlier this year after scores of death threats from insurgents.

The military wouldn't release statistics, but attacks on U.S. troops are frequent.

Indeed, Haditha has been the site of some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. forces. On Aug. 1, six Marine reservists were killed in an ambush; two days later, a roadside bomb killed 14 Marines traveling in an amphibious assault vehicle just outside the town, the deadliest single attack ever on U.S. forces.

On Nov. 19, according to military spokeswoman Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, the Marines were hit four separate times by roadside bombs and were fired on multiple times by gunmen they couldn't see. Three years after the war began, the U.S. military concedes it hasn't figured out how to tell a terrorist from an ordinary citizen in places like Haditha.

A newly poured spot of asphalt now marks the spot where the IED, or improvised explosive device, exploded. It was 7:15 a.m. and the blast was the first IED of the day. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, died instantly. The armed fire attack started immediately, according to the Marines.

There is as yet no official public version of what took place next and U.S. officials familiar with the investigation would discuss the incident only if their names were not used.

According to these officials, a car approached the convoy at about the same time the shooting began. The Marines signaled it to stop and it did. But it was too close to the convoy and when four men jumped out of it, the Marines, suspecting the men had been involved in the IED attack, shot them dead.

Yaseen said he and his brother's family were asleep in their houses about 100 yards away when the explosion woke them. Minutes later, they heard the Marines blocking off the road.

Yaseen, citing Safa's account, said Younes started to prepare the family for the search they knew was coming, separating the men from the women and the children, as is custom during searches.

Younes moved his five children and sister-in-law into the bedroom, Yaseen said Safa told him. There, his wife was lying in bed, recovering from an appendectomy. They waited.

The Marines moved into another house first, according to U.S. officials. In that house, the Marines saw a line of closed doors and thought an ambush was coming. They shot, and seven people inside were killed, including one child. Two other children who stayed in the house survived. A woman who ran out with her baby also survived, military officials said.

Yaseen said Safa told him that her father heard something so he went to the front of the house. Seconds later, Safa said she heard several gunshots. She didn't know it at the time, but her father was dying. Four Marines then moved into the bedroom, where some of her sisters were standing at their mother's bedside, hugging her.

Yassen said Safa told him that one Marine started yelling at them in English, but that they didn't understand what he was saying. The women and children started screaming in fear, which Yaseen could hear from next door. This went on for several minutes, he said.

He said he never heard gunshots, only a long sudden silence.

Desperate, he tried to get next door and find out what happened, but Marines wouldn't let him pass.

"The waiting was killing me," Yaseen said. "We didn't know what happened."

Three hours later, someone knocked at Yaseen's door. He could hear a young voice wheezing and sobbing on the other side. It was Safa, covered in blood and dirt. Yaseen said he couldn't remember what she was wearing; he only saw the blood.

The family was dead, Safa told Yaseen.

Yaseen's wife cleaned Safa up while Yaseen prepared a white flag. Marines were still blocking the area. Carrying the flag, Yaseen, his wife, and Safa ran 200 yards to another relative's house where they have stayed since.

Safa trembled as Yaseen told the story to a visitor. She tried to tell it herself, but she couldn't. "My father told us to gather in one room, so the Americans could search," she said. And then she started to cry.

Yaseen said that Safa told him that four soldiers came into the bedroom, but only one did the yelling. Her mother, who had heard the shooting asked: "What did you do to my husband?" Her sisters, mother and aunt were crying. And then the one soldier who had been yelling started shooting.

Frightened, Safa fainted. She thought she had died. When she awoke, she remembered seeing her mother still lying in bed. Her head was blown open. She looked around and heard her 3-year-old brother, Mohammed, moan in pain. The blood was pouring out of his right arm.

"Come on, Mohammed. Get up so we can go to uncle's house," she told her brother. But he couldn't.

In the same room where her mother, aunt and sisters lay dead, Safa grabbed the toddler, sat down and leaned his head against her shoulder. She put his arm against her chest and held it to try to stop the bleeding. She kept holding and talking to him until, like everyone else in the room, he too was silent. And then she ran next door.

Yaseen didn't see the rest of his brother's family until he went to Haditha Hospital the next day to pick up the bodies. Dr. Waleed Abdul Khaliq al-Obeidi, the director of Haditha Hospital, said they arrived around midnight, about 12 hours after Safa left her house.

According to the death certificates, Younes died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. His wife, who was lying in bed, died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head. The daughters were all shot in the chest. Mohammed bled to death. Younes didn't have a weapon, military officials confirmed. [...]

Late last month, an IED exploded near the same spot where Terrazas was killed. Nearby shops started closing in the middle of the day, telling customers they feared being detained. Drivers suddenly stopped and pointed to the rising plume of smoke.

"That might have targeted the Americans," one driver said to another stopped and fearful about what to do next. "The Americans are coming."
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"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th president of the United States

When a country's leaders are bent for war, and they believe to have the means to do it, there is little that can stop them. This was amply demonstrated before World War I, when the German High Command under Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke had been preparing for war for a long time. The archduke's assassination, in the summer of 1914, provided the pretext for war. Germany then launched a ''preemptive'' war against France and Russia, and the rest is history. Adolf Hitler did the same thing to start World War II. He launched "preventive" attacks and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Poland in 1939, ostensibly to provoke "regime change" in these countries.

It was also imperial Japan's pretext when it made the "preventive" offensive and unprovoked attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. In many other cases-such as the invasion of Bulgaria by Greece in 1925, Manchuria by Japan in 1931, Ethiopia by Mussolini's fascist Italy in 1935, Greece by Mussolini again in 1940, or Hungary by the Soviet Union under Khrushchev in 1956, Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union under Bresznev in 1968, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-all the invading countries, without exception, claimed to act in the name of their self-defined national interests.

The war that George W. Bush launched against Iraq, in March 2003, followed the same pattern. It was preceded, in September 2002, by the re-issuing of the old but illegal "preventive war" theory, and dubbed this time the "Bush Doctrine". This was a war that had been planned and prepared for more than a decade. The perfect pretext came with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After some sideline manoeuvres at the United Nations, Bush went ahead with his war even though the U.N. Security Council refused to authorize the aggression. The real purpose of these manoeuvres was to gain public support in the U.S. through an intense propaganda campaign carried out with the help of the American corporate media (ACM). The purpose of this intense media campaign was to demonize Saddam Hussein and present him as a monster, armed with nuclear weapons and ready to use them against the United States.

The Bush administration had polls done months before the 2003 war of aggression against Iraq that indicated the American public would only support a conflict with Iraq if there was a danger that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. That's the reason they had to invent the Iraqi nuclear threat, even though their own intelligence reports and those of the United Nations indicated otherwise.

You can be certain that if there is a war against Iran, it will follow the same pattern. The campaign of demagoguery and propaganda to picture Iran as a direct (nuclear) threat to the United States is going full speed. -Vice President Dick Cheney, the same one who was saying, every other day in 2002, that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" aimed at the United States, is all over the place again saying there would be "meaningful consequences" if Iran refuses to comply with demands to stop its nuclear program, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that there is "no evidence of a nuclear weapons program or any diversion of nuclear material," in Iran. That this is also a program which is perfectly legal under the terms of the 1968 Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or that the United States has just violated this treaty by signing a nuclear cooperation agreement with India, and has for years assisted Israel in building its stockpile of nuclear bombs, does not really matter. But we know that the Bush-Cheney administration is not preoccupied with legal matters. For his part, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix says Iran is at least five years from a nuclear bomb.

What matters is the propaganda results. And it works. Just as if it were freshly drawn from George Orwell's novel '1984' a recent Fox poll found that Iran has now replaced North Korea as the nation Americans believe to be America's greatest immediate threat. And a Washington Post poll found 56 percent of Americans back military action to ensure Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon. An important propaganda step was achieved on March 28 (2006), when the U. N. Security Conncil approved unanimously a statement, not legally binding, urging Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and limit its nuclear program to exclusively peaceful purposes, as requested by the International Atomic Energy Agency .

But, just as the U.S.-led war against Iraq had little to do with the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States and a lot to do with Neocons' plans to subjugate the entire Middle East, the coming U.S.-led war against Iran has little to do with any Iranian nuclear threat against the United States.

The Neocons, who always put Israel first, have long lobbied for the U.S. to strike at Iran and Syria. The Bush-Cheney administration would merely be following the Neocons' line by overthrowing the mullahs in charge in Tehran. This would be done essentially for the same reasons the CIA overthrew the elected government of Muhammad Mossadeq, in 1953, after it had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The Neocon Bush-Cheney administration wants to establish a friendly government in Iran in order to control the oil development of the Caspian Sea and in order to remove another potential adversary to Israel. -There is also another geopolitical objective this time, and that is to prevent Iran from going ahead full speed with its electronic Iranian Oil Bourse. Initially scheduled to go into business last March, and to use the euro for international oil transactions rather than the US dollar, the Iranian Bourse's starting date has been postponed by at least several months and, possibly by more than a year. In any case, it would certainly not be fully operational before July 1st (2006).

In the longer term, however, the Iranian Oil Bourse could pose a challenge to the current system built around the U.S. dollar. Presently, the two international oil exchanges, the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), are both controlled by American interests (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.) and both invoice sales solely in US dollars. You have to keep in mind that Iraq was the first country, in November 2000, to actually demand to be paid in euros for its oil. Now, the same scenario could unfold in the coming months with Iran. With one exception: this time, Great Britain has told George W. Bush that it will not take part in any armed action against Iran's nuclear sites. The same applies to Russia: it has signified that it will not support any attempts to use force to resolve the stand-off over Iran's controversial nuclear program.

Nevertheless, a military conflict with Iran could come earlier than most people expect, although some observers expect a fall U.S.-Iran showdown, just in time for the November American mid-term elections. Desperate people do desperate things, and Bush's illegal war in Iraq is not going well. It cannot be exploited, as in the beginning, for domestic partisan political reasons. Bush may thus be tempted to raise the ante and go after Iran to reclaim his "Commander-in-Chief" mantle. Keep in mind also that October is traditionally the month of big stock market corrections.-Stay tuned.

If accurate, this will mean your already worthless money will be even more worthless and hyper-inflation will eventually decimate what remains of the so-called middle class. If Seagrave is correct, the neocons are engineering a New Serfdom for the vast majority of Americans, most who remain utterly clueless about what the Straussian neocons have in mind for them and their children.

“The war in Iraq, and other unwise decisions that caused Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil to quit the Administration in protest over the lack of a sound policy process, have drained the piggy bank,” Seagrave continues. “Bush may well be printing money, and he is probably also selling off ‘futures’ like crazy. We could have a major crisis prior to 2008 that demands a restructuring of the government along with a very rapid re-appreciation of what our national strategy needs to be.”

Seagrave, however, does not provide an explanation why Bush would do such a thing, although he notes that the “White House apparently hoped that by the time anyone found out about the flooding of the market with dollars, they could stage an event, such as an air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, that would distract the public entirely.” Of course, an attack on Iran (more details on this revealed by Seymour Hersh) will not be launched primarily as a distraction—it is a key objective of the Straussian neocon plan.

In addition to the obvious fact the government is now rife with criminal embezzlers and thieves (note the few trillion missing from the Pentagon), the criminal Straussian neocons plan to restructure American society and warp its once lofty ideals (already seriously eroded through neoliberal globalism) via economic strangulation and perpetual conflict, first in the Muslim Middle East and then, as promised, elsewhere (China and Russia are at the top of the list).

It should be remembered the core Straussians are basically Trotskyites and Leon Trotsky advocated “permanent revolution,” that is to say a radical change through Stagism, or the Theory of Stages (a crucial tenet of neoliberal globalism). Of course, Trotsky was a communist and supposedly believed in the proletariat taking power through violence and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. The Straussian neocons, however, are not interested in a revolution of the proletariat—they are interested in elevating themselves to the very pinnacle of state power and ruling as Machiavellian princes over the benighted masses.

“The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine,” Shadia Drury, a leading scholarly critic of Strauss, told Danny Postel. “In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination—and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.” As the Straussian would have it, the masses are “selfish, slothful, and indolent” and “can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe,” or for that matter an economic depression coupled with perpetual war, as Orwell envisaged (”Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia”). The attacks of September 11, 2001, a “new Pearl Harbor,” were the beginning of this Straussian revolution, an event many Straussians believe was squandered because “democracy” got in the way (and because people naturally avoid a perpetual state of war in favor of peace, even partial peace).

Strauss borrowed a lot from the “Marxist of the right,” Alexandre Kojève (a student of the Nazi lover Martin Heidegger), and the Nazi jurist and advocate of totalitarianism, Carl Schmitt. “Kojève lamented the animalization of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialization of life,” explains Drury. “All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and ‘creature comforts.’ Life can be politicized once more, and man’s humanity can be restored…. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.”

Drury continues:

If America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.

Our current crop of Straussians, well ensconced in the White House and the Pentagon, are in the process overturning the “modern project” and a not so modern project, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This will be accomplished through economic catastrophe and engineered war. Deprived of opportunity, income, and even food—and for those unable to provide for themselves, consider the Super Dome in New Orleans as a grim reminder—the masses will do whatever is required, especially if darksome devils and frightful Islamic enemies are unrelentingly portrayed at the ready with dirty nukes. In dire straits, with the prospect of wheelbarrows of money to buy loaves of bread as inflation shoots skyward by the hour, people will do almost anything asked of them.

I don’t claim to be an economist. On the other hand, as a novice student of history, I understand how government manipulates people through economic manipulation and engineered crises. I believe the Straussian neocons are fascists masquerading as “conservatives” and even a cursory examination of their cobbled together philosophy—a large dose of Straussian “ethics,” a dash of Trotsky’s perpetual revolution, a pinch of Jacobin militancy and debauchery—and a general overview of history reveals what they have in mind for us. I believe they are capable, through their sock puppet Bush the Minor, a “dry alcoholic” and Manichean nihilist parading as a “conservative,” of looting the treasury, siphoning off trillions from the Pentagon, and engineering the crash of the economy in order to realize their vision of a Machiavellian hell on earth where they rule and the superstitious masses, infused with coarse nationalism and religion, are expected to follow.

Of course, they are insane and will ultimately destroy the planet.

However, one must ask, are we insane as well to let them get away with it? Click here to read the original
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Russia will not let anybody set it at loggerheads with the Islamic world ... The increased significance of the energy factor in global politics is on the mind of many. Even those who have got used to thinking in terms of geopolitics appreciate that the equation formula of strategic stability has changed and the specific weight of nuclear deterrence itself has diminished ... At the same time, it is obvious that any sustained development of Russia's energy sector rules out for the foreseeable future any disregard of the Near and Middle East resources in a global energy balance.

I am well aware that the heads of state and peoples of the Arab world, and in other Muslim states, share Russia's growing concern about the danger arising out of new divisions in the international community. It is our deep conviction that the time has come to act, and to act together, under the auspices of the United Nations as a key player.

As the events of the last few years in the Middle East have shown, unilateral actions do not resolve problems and they even aggravate them. Russia, a multi-confessional country with observer status within the Organization of Islamic Conference, has firm intentions to make a significant contribution to this teamwork.

A few were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws recovered from a gestapo prison. The men in the photographs are not Nazis, however, but suspected communists, arrested in 1946 because they were thought to support the Soviet Union, an ally 18 months earlier.

Apparently believing that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, the War Office was seeking information about Russian military and intelligence methods. Dozens of women were also detained and tortured, as were a number of genuine Soviet agents, scores of suspected Nazis, and former members of the SS.

Yesterday there were calls for the Ministry of Defence to acknowledge what had happened and apologise. Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrats' defence spokesman, said: "It's too late for anyone to be held personally responsible, or held politically to account, but it's not too late for the MoD to acknowledge what has happened."

Sherman Carroll, of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, said British authorities should also apologise and pay compensation to survivors. "The suggestion that Britain did not use torture during world war two and in the immediate aftermath, because it was regarded as 'ineffective', is a mythology that has been successfully propagated for decades," he said. "The fact that it took place should be acknowledged."

The MoD dismissed the calls, saying questions about the interrogation centres were a matter for the Foreign Office.

Declassified Whitehall papers show that members of the Labour government of the day went to great lengths to hide the ill-treatment, in part, as one minister wrote, to conceal "the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

Almost six decades later the photographs were still being kept secret. Four months ago they were removed from a police report on the mistreatment of inmates at one of the interrogation centres, near Hanover, shortly before the document was released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

Although the file was in the possession of the Foreign Office, the pictures were removed at the request of the Ministry of Defence. They have finally been released after an appeal by the Guardian. The photographs were taken in February 1947 by a Royal Navy officer who was determined to bring the torture programme to an end. Pictures of other victims, taken by the same officer, appear to have vanished from the Foreign Office files.

Meanwhile documents about a secret interrogation centre which the War Office operated in central London between 1945 and 1948, where large numbers of men are now known to have been badly mistreated, are still being withheld by the Ministry of Defence. Officials say the papers cannot yet be released because they have been contaminated with asbestos.

It is not clear whether the men in the photographs fully recovered from their mistreatment. It is also unclear, from examination of the War Office and Foreign Office documents now available, when the torture of prisoners in Germany came to an end.



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The Wave - It's Not a Joke

After the revelation that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former vice presidential chief of staff, testified that President Bush allegedly authorized him to disclose classified portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) pertaining to Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction, Fox News largely ignored the story, preferring instead to focus on the controversy surrounding Rep. Cynthia McKinney's (D-GA) alleged altercation with a Capitol Police officer. A Media Matters for America review of Fox News coverage of these two events found that from noon to 10:00 p.m. ET on April 6, Fox News devoted more than twice as much time discussing McKinney's alleged altercation with the police officer (53 minutes) than to reporting on the revelation that Bush may have authorized Libby to reveal then-classified intelligence information to the media (25 minutes). Libby's revelation was drawn from court papers FBI special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald filed in the government's case against Libby, who has been charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI, related to the leak of then-CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame's identity.

The New York Sun, which broke the story and posted the "Web Exclusive" to its website at 9:02 a.m. ET on April 6, reported that Libby "testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded 'National Intelligence Estimate' on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case." As an April 6 Associated Press report noted:

[T]he disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The authorization came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

Both MSNBC and CNN first covered the story at the top of the noon hour, and spent significant time throughout the day reporting on the breaking news. By contrast, Fox News did not initially report on the findings until approximately 12:20 p.m. and then apparently decided, as conservative talk show host and columnist Larry Elder later stated during the April 6 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, to "get back to the real issue, here": Cynthia McKinney.

As illustrated by the graphs below, Fox News devoted twice the amount of coverage to the McKinney incident, her April 6 apology to Congress, and speculation over whether she would be indicted for the incident, as it devoted to covering the latest developments in the CIA leak investigation.

From noon to 10:00 p.m., Fox News anchors, commentators, reporters, and guests mentioned Bush's alleged authorization a mere 11 times as opposed to 21 mentions of the McKinney controversy. They spent approximately 25 minutes discussing the news of the alleged leak compared to 53 minutes spent on the latest development in the McKinney incident. In fact, while every Fox News program between noon and 10:00 p.m. featured at least one report on McKinney, several shows -- including Your World with Neil Cavuto and The O'Reilly Factor -- did not report on Libby at all.

During the 9 p.m. hour, Hannity & Colmes spent approximately 11 minutes covering McKinney, compared with about 1 minute discussing the CIA leak investigation. Except for a news brief, the program mentioned Libby only during a debate over the McKinney controversy, when co-host Alan Colmes asked Elder if it was correct that Republicans "would rather talk about Cynthia McKinney" than "about the leak information that came out today." Elder responded:

ELDER: Well, I guess that's why you brought it up. Bringing up the "Scooter" Libby thing because that's what you really want to talk about. Let's get back to the real issue, here [McKinney].

Further, according to her website, Fox News host Greta van Susteren admitted that her show, On the Record, which airs at 10:00 p.m. ET, also did not cover the Libby story. Van Susteren stated that she "pulled the plug on doing the segment after spending about two hours studying the pleadings" because "the more I studied it, the more I realized that it is complicated and I want to make sure I get it right."

Continuing, van Susteren suggested that Fox News had adequately covered the story and stated that she would cover it the following night only if she could figure out how to "do it differently from what has already been done" or if "some new information emerges today":

This is not to take from the many other news organizations -- and my own -- who covered the story, I just wanted to study it further. It is a very important story and since so many shows were doing it, I felt comfortable being a bit more cautious and pulling back.

[...]

If I can figure out how to advance the story, or do it differently from what has already been done, we will cover it on our show tonight. I also need to measure in my mind whether it has been done and done and done in the last 24 hours and if we are now too late (because I dragged my feet yesterday!) If some new information emerges today, then even if the story was done by everyone yesterday -- and it was -- it becomes a new story today.

Moreover, as TVNewser reported on April 7, Fox News failed to cover the White House briefing, where press secretary Scott McClellan "was quizzed about Bush's involvement in the leaks." Both CNN and MSNBC aired portions of McClellan's April 7 White House press briefing.

From the April 6 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:

COLMES: Larry, you know, on a day when we find out, that according to "Scooter" Libby, that President Bush leaked information, leaked it for his own well-being, and Cheney was involved, as well, Republicans, I guess, would rather talk about Cynthia McKinney, who, in fact, did apologize. I guess that's easier, or better for the Republican agenda than to talk about the leak information that came out today. Right?

ELDER: Well, I guess that's why you brought it up. Bringing up the "Scooter" Libby thing because that's what you really want to talk about. Let's get back to the real issue, here.

COLMES: I think it's more important for the country.

Final Jeopardy

Asking the Right Question About the President's Involvement in the CIA Leak Affair

By Elizabeth de la Vega

The latest in a parade of horrors emanating from the Bush administration appeared Thursday in the form of a revelation buried in papers filed in federal court by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, now under indictment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, told the Grand Jury Fitzgerald convened that President Bush had -- via Vice President Cheney -- authorized him to disclose selected information from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, which he did during a private breakfast meeting at the St. Regis Hotel on July 8, 2003.

On Friday, in a press conference that bore a striking similarity to Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, President Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan dutifully responded to reporters' questions about the disclosure. No, the increasingly robotic McClellan said, the White House will not comment on an ongoing case. But, he assured the assembled journalists, the President can declassify whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants. So, McClellan implied, it would have been perfectly legal for the President to have taken this action, which he could not, of course, comment on because this was an ongoing case (and so on).

Thus has begun a debate in our media whose starting questions usually run along the lines of: "Is what the President did legal?" or "Does the President have authority to declassify information at will?" (Given the President's failure to deny Libby's allegation, it has largely been accepted as true.) The answer to those questions has generally been: Yes, the President -- as chief executive -- has the authority to declassify information at will.

But it is not only in the TV game show world of Jeopardy! that the correct answer to a problem depends on the question asked. And, as it happens, those are simply not the right questions.

In order to decide what legal issues arise from a given set of facts -- in other words, in order to frame the right questions -- we first have to determine what the facts are. This is what we know, in summary, about the CIA leak case.

We know that Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson had been an extremely painful thorn in the side of the Bush administration long before he wrote the infamous July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald described as having been viewed "in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

In March of 2003, Wilson had become increasingly vocal in questioning the administration's reasons for war. In a Nation article and a March 2 appearance on CNN, as well as a March 4 panel on Ted Koppel's Nightline, Wilson argued that the White House wanted to invade Iraq, not because of weapons of mass destruction, but because it wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East. Wilson's criticisms coincided with those of David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who was questioning the President's false and misleading arguments that aluminum tubes intercepted en route to Iraq had been meant for an Iraqi nuclear program.

Fueling the fire, on March 7, Mohammed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had flatly declared that there was no evidence the Iraqis were reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program, pointing out that neither the aluminum tubes claim nor the attempted-purchase-of-uranium-in-Niger claim were valid. Indeed, El Baradei explained, the documents relating to an attempted purchase of uranium were obvious forgeries. The next day, a "senior administration official" was quoted in the Washington Post as saying in response to El Baradei's statement, "We fell for it." Then Wilson appeared again on CNN and said, essentially, that the senior administration official was either lying or incompetent because analysts from several different intelligence agencies already knew of the forgeries.

Quite obviously, then, Joseph Wilson had the attention of the Bush administration as early as March 2003, long before he wrote the July 6 op-ed. And it was on March 23 that President Bush issued an amended executive order in which he claimed the right to expand Vice President Cheney's authority to declassify documents.

We also know that the President's glow from the "Mission Accomplished" spectacle had barely dimmed by May 6, 2003 when Joseph Wilson resurfaced in a Nicholas Kristof New York Times column which described "an unnamed former ambassador's" trip to Niger as casting doubt on the accuracy of the "sixteen words" relating to uranium procurements from Africa that had been in the President's State of the Union address that January. At this point, of course, Wilson would be seen as directly attacking both the President and the Vice President.

Moreover, throughout May and June, questions about the missing weapons of mass destruction increased in volume and intensity in the media and in press conferences. as did concerns about Joseph Wilson. Then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 8 to rebut the charges, making her famous "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency" comment about the CIA. By the end of June 2003, more than a dozen top administration officials, including Rice and Cheney, who were known to be the President's closest advisers, were intensely involved in dealing with the problem of Joseph Wilson and his allegations. Under the circumstances, it is impossible to believe that President Bush was either unaware of, or indifferent to, the issue. Clearly he was well aware of his slowly waning credibility, as evidenced by the surfacing of a new administration theme in June: the deriding of "revisionist historians" who were questioning the pre-war intelligence.

We also know that the debate about the Bush administration's grounds for war had been raging since before the war began. In fact, it had been raging since before Congress voted to authorize the war. We know now that the National Intelligence Estimate, which was prepared in early October 2002, contained numerous qualifiers and caveats that were omitted from the minimalist, unclassified "White Paper" version issued simultaneously. At the time, and up to the start of the war, numerous congresspersons and others had made public and private pleas to the administration to declassify the NIE so there could be a reasoned debate about the issues. But the administration had steadfastly refused, citing national security concerns, even though debate about the evidence for war -- the aluminum tubes, the Niger uranium, the existence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda -- continued both before and after the invasion.

What was different in June 2003 when the President evidently did decide to declassify bits of the NIE? The answer is: He was kicking off his reelection campaign. As Helen Thomas wrote on Friday, June 27, 2003, "President George W. Bush is trying to scoop up an historic $200 million at political fundraising events to kick off his reelection campaign." He had raised close to $10 million over the previous week and had more events "slated for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Tampa before the end of July."

A perfect storm looked to be forming: four months of criticism by Joseph Wilson, mounting questions and criticism about pre-war intelligence and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction -- and the kick off to Bush's historic $200 million reelection campaign. That was the state of affairs on July 6, 2003 when Joseph Wilson's op-ed appeared. And as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald put it in the filing revealed last week, "The evidence will show that [it] was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

Can anyone doubt, under these circumstances, that President Bush did in fact authorize Cheney to tell Libby to leak previously classified parts of the October 2002 NIE to Judith Miller? Of course not -- especially when the White House's response has not been to deny it, but to say that the President can declassify whatever he wants at his whim.

There is, however, one remaining piece of the puzzle. Libby testified that he was specifically authorized to speak to Judith Miller by Cheney and to disclose "key judgments" from the NIE because the document was "pretty definitive" against what Wilson had said; and Cheney thought it was "very important" for the key judgments of the NIE to come out. Libby testified that he questioned Cheney about whether he could do this and the Vice President later came back and said the President had authorized it. According to Libby, Cheney told him to tell Miller that a "key judgment" of the NIE said that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium in Africa. Libby said he was also told by Cheney to disclose documents, including a brief abstract of the NIE's key judgments, which was one of the reasons the meeting was held at a hotel. Libby insisted that he not be named as a source: he wanted to be described as a "former Hill staffer." In addition, Libby testified, he discussed with Miller the contents of a still-classified CIA report -- which Libby told Miller had been written by Joseph Wilson -- that described a 1999 visit to Niger by a group of Iraqis who allegedly wanted to purchase uranium. Libby believed that only he, Cheney, and the President knew about the secret declassification; he did not reveal it to anyone during the formal declassification process that ensued.

Libby's account raises too many issues to address, not the least of which is that he had already spoken to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about the still-classified NIE in June. Two other key issues, however, relate to the information Libby was instructed to disclose. First, the NIE Key Judgments did not say that the Iraqis were "vigorously trying to procure" uranium from Africa. They said nothing whatsoever about uranium procurements. The body of the NIE included some vague assertions about such procurement efforts, but even those had been repudiated by the CIA in October 2002. In addition, as President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Lewis Libby all knew, the documents supporting the assertions had been proved to be forgeries by both U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In other words, it is clear that this secret disclosure of unilaterally declassified material from the NIE. was at best seriously misleading, if not entirely false.

That the contents of another disclosed document had been written by Joseph Wilson, as Libby told Miller, was equally false and no less misleading, because Wilson did not write any report whatsoever after his trip to Niger. He orally reported his findings to the CIA.

Scott McClellan now says that this declassification and instantaneous disclosure was prompted by the public interest in contributing to the understanding of an ongoing debate. We know that is not true.

After all, before the war, the existence of a crucial debate about whether pre-war intelligence justified an invasion of Iraq was not considered sufficient cause to impel President Bush to decide to declassify the NIE. After the war, when no weapons of mass destruction were being found, the existence of debate about pre-war intelligence did not impel Bush to declassify the NIE. Even today, most of the NIE, including the one-page President's Summary, is not declassified.

We now have sufficient information to frame the Final Jeopardy! question. This is it:

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?

The answer is obvious: No. Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the L.A. Times, Salon, and Mother Jones. She writes regularly for TomDispatch. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net



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Poll Finds Bush Job Rating at New Low

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 11, 2006; Page A01

Political reversals at home and continued bad news from Iraq have dragged President Bush's standing with the public to a new low, at the same time that Republican fortunes on Capitol Hill also are deteriorating, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 38 percent of the public approve of the job Bush is doing, down three percentage points in the past month and his worst showing in Post-ABC polling since he became president. Sixty percent disapprove of his performance.
With less than seven months remaining before the midterm elections, Bush's political troubles already appear to be casting a long shadow over them. Barely a third of registered voters, 35 percent, approve of the way the Republican-led Congress is doing its job -- the lowest level of support in nine years.

The negative judgments about the president and the congressional majority reflect the breadth of the GOP's difficulties and suggest that the problems of each may be mutually reinforcing. Although the numbers do not represent a precipitous decline over recent surveys, the fact that they have stayed at low levels over recent months indicates that the GOP is confronting some fundamental obstacles with public opinion rather than a patch of bad luck.

A majority of registered voters, 55 percent, say they plan to vote for the Democratic candidate in their House district, while 40 percent support the Republican candidate. That is the largest share of the electorate favoring Democrats in Post-ABC polls since the mid-1980s.

This grim news for the GOP is offset somewhat by the finding that 59 percent of voters still say they approve of their own representative. But even these numbers are weaker than in recent off-year election cycles and identical to support of congressional incumbents in June 1994 -- five months before Democrats lost control of Congress to Republicans.

As Bush and the Republicans falter, Democrats have emerged as the party most Americans trust to deal with such issues as Iraq, the economy and health care. By 49 to 42 percent, Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to do a better job of handling Iraq.

Democrats also hold a six-percentage-point advantage over the GOP (49 percent to 43 percent) as the party most trusted to handle the economy. Their lead swells to double digits on such as issues as immigration (12 points), prescription drug benefits for the elderly (28 points), health care (32 points) and dealing with corruption in Washington (25 points).

The public divides evenly on only one issue: terrorism, with 46 percent expressing more confidence in the Democrats and 45 percent trusting Republicans on a top voting concern that the GOP counts on dominating.

But there is plenty of time left before Election Day for Republicans to take back ground they have lost to Democrats -- or for Democrats to solidify their recent gains. In the past year, public attitudes toward Bush and the Republicans have been driven by the news. Bush's popularity rebounded at the end of last year in response to the democratic elections in Iraq and renewed optimism about the economy at home -- only to stumble as the deadly insurgency continued and scandals in Congress and the White House drove down perceptions of the president and his party.

A total of 1,027 randomly selected adults were interviewed April 6 to 9 for this survey. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for the overall results.

Bush's job approval rating has remained below 50 percent for nearly a year. Perhaps more ominous for the president, 47 percent in the latest poll say they "strongly" disapprove of Bush's handling of the presidency -- more than double the 20 percent who strongly approve. It marked the second straight month that the proportion of Americans intensely critical of the president was larger than his overall job approval rating. In comparison, the percentage who strongly disapproved of President Bill Clinton on that measure never exceeded 33 percent in Post-ABC News polls.

The public is even more critical of Bush's performance in specific areas. On six of seven key issues, fewer than half of the respondents approve of the job Bush is doing, while majorities express dissatisfaction with him on Iraq (62 percent), health care (62 percent) and immigration (61 percent).

Four in 10 -- 40 percent -- say Bush is doing a good job with the economy, down eight percentage points in a month. One reason for the drop may be the recent sharp increase in fuel costs. Fewer than one in four approve of his handling of gasoline prices, virtually the same as last summer when gas prices topped $3 a gallon. Overall, 44 percent said the increases are causing "serious hardship" in their family, up significantly from August.

Half of the public now disapproves of the way Bush is handling the fight against terrorism, an issue on which majorities of Americans had typically given him high marks until last year.

The depth of public dissatisfaction with Bush and the highly partisan nature of the criticism are underscored by public attitudes toward efforts by some in Congress to censure him or impeach him for his actions as president.

Democratic and Republican congressional leaders view both scenarios as remote possibilities. Still, more than four in 10 Americans -- 45 percent -- favor censuring or formally reprimanding Bush for authorizing wiretaps of telephone calls and e-mails of terrorism suspects without court permission. Two-thirds of Democrats and half of all independents, but only one in six Republicans, support censuring Bush, the poll found.

Last month, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) introduced a resolution in the Senate to censure Bush. A majority of Americans, 56 percent, said his move was driven more by politics than by principle.

Calls to impeach Bush are not resonating beyond Democratic partisans. One-third of Americans, including a majority of Democrats (55 percent), favor impeaching Bush and removing him from office. But more than nine in 10 Republicans and two-thirds of independents oppose impeachment.

The ongoing bloodshed and political chaos in Iraq continue to drag down support for the war, the survey found. Barely four in 10 -- 41 percent -- say the war is worth fighting, down five percentage points since December. Although more than half of Americans think troop levels in Iraq should be decreased, only 15 percent are calling for an immediate withdrawal, a figure that has not varied much over the past year.



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European Disarray

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Prodi claims victory in Italy poll

Staff and agencies
Tuesday April 11, 2006

Romano Prodi today claimed victory in Italy's general election as his centre-left coalition won control of the lower house of parliament.

The centre-left won the lower house with 49.8% of the vote, compared to 49.7% for Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right coalition. Voter turnout was about 84%.
The winning coalition is automatically awarded 55% of the seats under a new electoral law. Mr Berlusconi's coalition held a one-seat lead in the 315-seat upper house, according to exit polls, but results for six seats elected by Italians abroad were still being counted.

Since both chambers have equal powers, a split control of parliament could deadlock legislation and force the country back to the polls.

"We have won, and now we have to start working to implement our program and unify the country," Mr Prodi said at a rally in Rome. "I am grateful to all of you because it has been a very difficult battle. Until the very end we were left in suspense, but in the end victory has arrived."

But the claim was immediately contested by Mr Berlusconi's camp. Paolo Bonaiuti, a spokesman for the sitting prime minister, told reporters that the centre-right coalition would call for a "scrupulous" check of election ballots. He called for a vote recount in the lower house, noting that the difference in the Chamber amounted to less than 25,000 votes.

"Such a narrow difference demands that there be a careful verification of the vote count," he said.

Later, some of Mr Prodi's supporters, waving flags, moved to Mr Berlusconi's nearby residence and shouted slogans under the premier's windows.

The election has been balanced on a knife-edge with exit polls showing at times both Mr Berlusconi and Mr Prodi heading for victory. The Senate and lower chamber of parliament have equal powers and any coalition would have to control both to form a government. Some centre-left and centre-right leaders have said that if neither side controls both houses, new elections should be called.

Even if one coalition controls both chambers, it would find it extremely difficult to pass legislation with such a slim majority, returning Italy to instability after Mr Berlusconi's five years in power.

If parliament is split between the two coalitions, the president could try to name a government of technocrats until another election can be held. He could also seek to fashion a coalition of left and right, but given bitter divisions among Italy's political parties, that seems unlikely.

Some politicians said that a possible solution to a legislative deadlock might be a "grand-coalition" government to handle urgent economic matters and the election of a new president - whose mandate expires in mid-May - with new parliamentary elections later in the year.

"We have to immediately send a message to the markets, to whomever wants to invest in Italy, that the country is not going to fall apart," said the culture minister, Rocco Buttiglione.

Mr Berlusconi, a 69-year-old media mogul who is Italy's longest serving premier since the second world war, was aiming for his third premiership with an often-squabbling coalition of his Forza Italia party, the former neo-fascist National Alliance, pro-Vatican forces and the anti-immigrant Northern League.

The 66-year-old Mr Prodi, a former premier and EU chief, was making his comeback bid with a potentially unwieldy coalition of moderate Christian Democrats, Greens, liberals, communists and former communists.

Italian voters were mainly preoccupied with finances. Mr Berlusconi, a billionaire businessman whose empire includes TV networks, insurance and real estate, failed to jumpstart a flat economy during his tenure, but promised to abolish a homeowner's property tax. Mr Prodi said he would revive an inheritance tax abolished by Mr Berlusconi, but only for the richest; he also promised to cut payroll taxes to try to spur hiring.



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Europe and its leaders in turmoil

Richard Owen in Rome and Adam Sage in Paris
The Sunday Times
April 11, 2006

TWO of Europe's biggest countries faced turmoil last night after voters gave neither Left nor Right a decisive advantage in Italy's general election and President Chirac's Government was forced to abandon its bitterly contested labour reforms in France.
Italy faced chaos and confusion as early projections showed neither Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right alliance nor Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition had secured a clear victory.

The two blocs were neck and neck in both the Lower and Upper Houses, but Signor Berlusconi's bloc was gaining ground late last night. An Italian prime minister needs to win both to govern effectively. A split result could mean fresh elections.

Early exit polls proved to be wrong in predicting a clear victory for Signor Prodi, the former European Commission President, as Signor Berlusconi, whose five years in power have been dogged by economic stagnation and allegations of corruption, steadily gained ground during the count.

In both camps jubilation jostled with dismay. It was conceivable that the new government could be determined by the 12 MPs and six senators elected by a million Italians living overseas.

In France, M Chirac ordered Dominique de Villepin, his handpicked Prime Minister, to beat a humiliating retreat on his youth employment legislation after three months of strikes and huge street protests.

The upheavals in two of the European Union's four biggest countries will have repercussions far beyond their borders.

Signor Berlusconi has been pro-American, Eurosceptic, and an ally of President Bush and Tony Blair on Iraq and other issues. Under Signor Prodi Italy would favour Brussels over Washington and accelerate the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq. A sustained period of political paralysis would further postpone efforts to revive Italy's sick economy.

Most analysts agreed that M Chirac's capitulation marked the end of any serious attempts to reform France's restrictive labour laws before the presidential election in 2007.

It renders him a lame duck for the rest of his second term and seriously damages M de Villepin's chances of succeeding him, leaving the Prime Minister's old rival Nicolas Sarkozy the clear favourite to be the Centre Right's presidential candidate. However, the real victors were the socialists whose hopes of winning back the Elysée Palace have soared.

M de Villepin had gambled his political future on ramming through legislation designed to cut youth unemployment by allowing workers under 26 to be sacked without reason during a two-year trial period. Looking weary, he appeared on television to announce the scrapping of his First Employment Contract (CPE) in the face of massive protests by students, trade unions and the Left. "The necessary conditions of confidence and calm are not there," he said.

"I wanted to propose a strong solution to break with unemployment in our country. That was not understood by everyone. I regret it."

The Government said the CPE would be replaced by a more orthodox French measure to provide subsidies of 300 million euros (£200 million) a year to companies taking on young people.

Since the student riots of 1968, French governments have repeatedly capitulated in the face of sustained street protests. As recently as last week M de Villepin had insisted that his Government would stand firm, but his approval rating has slumped to just 25 per cent and after yesterday's U-turn the prospect of him resigning was being openly discussed.

M Chirac's standing is equally dismal. He has been unable to impose order on a troubled country, or even on a government split by internal conflicts. Twice before in his long career he has been defeated by street protests, and he had been reluctant to take on France's powerful student and workers' unions again. But he was convinced by M de Villepin, who said the 'easy hire, easy fire' contract was a tool in the fight against a youth employment rate of almost 23 per cent.

In the event opponents depicted the CPE as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon "ultra-liberalism" which threatened the very essence of French identity.



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Solana: EU Should Consider Iran Sanctions

AP
Mon Apr 10, 5:40 AM ET

LUXEMBOURG - A top European Union official said Monday that the 25-nation bloc should consider sanctions against Iran, including a visa ban on nuclear officials, because Tehran refuses to cooperate with the United Nations on its nuclear program.

"We have to begin thinking about that possibility," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told reporters outside an EU foreign ministers meeting.
The ministers debated if the EU should get tougher with Iran over its nuclear plan, which the West fears is geared toward building nuclear weapons.

Solana ruled out, however, that EU would back any military action.

"Any military action is definitely out of the question for us," he said.

Solana said that the EU would await Iran's response to a
U.N. Security Council call for a halt to uranium enrichment before considering any actions. Iran has so far rejected international demands for clarity over its nuclear intentions.

"Iran has to respond to the Security Council. We have to be prepared in case they fail," Solana said.



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Poland Set For Talks On Hosting US Missile Defence Site

AFP
Apr 10, 2006

Warsaw - Washington has proposed holding detailed talks with Warsaw on locating part of a US anti-missile defence system on Polish soil, Poland's deputy foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski said Friday.

"They asked us officially if we were still interested in discussing the issue. Of course we said 'yes' and we are awaiting details," Waszczykowski was quoted as saying by Poland's PAP news agency.

"If Poland is chosen as a partner in these discussions, they could begin in July," he added.
"Poland has not yet made any commitment. We are listening and analysing what the Americans are telling us."

The Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper reported in November that Poland had held talks with the United States about stationing part of its anti-missile defence system on Polish soil.

The same month, a senior US defence official said Washington was discussing with Poland and other countries possible sites in Europe for a missile interceptor base capable of guarding against long-range missile attack.

Such a site in central Europe would provide both the United States and Europe protection against long-range missiles fired from the Middle East or North Africa, the official said.



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Madrid bombing suspects charged

Tuesday, 11 April 2006, 11:27 GMT 12:27 UK

A Spanish judge has charged 29 people over the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 which claimed 191 lives and left nearly 2,000 injured.

Most of those charged are Moroccan nationals, and the indictments run to almost 1,500 pages.
The trial is expected to go ahead early next year and to last 12 months.

So far, more than 100 people have been arrested in the course of the investigations into the attacks, which have been blamed on Islamic radicals.

Rush hour

Judge Juan del Olmo has accused five Moroccan men - Jamal Zougam, Abdelmajid Bouchar, Youssef Belhadj, Rabei Ousman Sayed Ahmed and Hassan el Haski - of 191 murders and 1,755 attempted murders.

Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a Spaniard suspected of providing the bombers with explosives, was charged with 192 murders - including the death of a policeman killed during a raid on suspected bombers after the attacks.

Spanish suspect Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras
Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras is accused of 192 murders

The others have been charged as accomplices over the 10 co-ordinated explosions on four trains during the busy morning rush hour.

Although the attack was claimed by al-Qaeda, the investigation has suggested the bombings were carried out by a local cell that was inspired by it, rather than directly ordered by the group's senior leadership.

Videotapes and internet postings by al-Qaeda leaders had urged Islamic radicals to target Spain and other countries with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attacks led to the fall of the then pro-US government in Spain, which had initially blamed the bombings on the Basque separatist group, Eta.

The complexity of the case and the large number of accused mean the trial is unlikely to get under way before next year.



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Cosmic Conundrums

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Hybrid comet-asteroid in mysterious break-up

09:30 11 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

Something substantial has broken off an icy 50-kilometre object beyond the orbit of Saturn, leaving puzzled astronomers trying to figure out why.

Comets have been seen breaking up before, but only after heating when passing close to the Sun or a gravitational disturbance following a close encounter with a planet.
However, at 1.9 billion kilometres, this object is very far from the Sun. Another mysterious feature is that much more gas and dust is escaping from the breakaway fragment than from the parent body. The disintegration has created a dust cloud more than 100,000 km across and which is several times brighter than the original object was before the event.

The object, called 60558 Echeclus, was discovered in 2000 and is a "centaur" - part rocky asteroid and part icy comet. Its new activity, revealed in images taken on 2 April, makes it look "really strange", says William Romanishen of the University of Oklahoma, US, one of the team that took the images. "The first thing that came to mind was a collision."

Earlier observations showed Echeclus rotates about once every 26 hours, so a fragment would need a push to escape its gravity, says Paul Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who spotted the original cloud of gas and dust around Echeclus on 30 December 2005.
Explosive sublimation

Such an impact on a comet-like body has not been observed before. But there are other possibilities, says Steve Tegler of Northern Arizona University, US, another team member. A likely one is that event was caused by explosive sublimation of volatile ices in Echeclus, resulting in material being blasted off, he says.

Tegler says the evaporating ice is probably carbon monoxide, with vaporises at about that distance from the Sun, where the object's temperature is about 80 degrees Kelvin, close to the sublimation temperature. No one has yet analysed the gas composition.

Another puzzle is the difference in activity between the main nucleus and the fragment. Freshly exposed ices normally sublimate, so "you'd expect equal activity from both pieces", Wiessman says. But the nucleus does not look very active.
Unstable orbits

Echeclus was discovered by the Spacewatch telescope in 2000, and at first looked like an asteroid. Then Weissman found it was surrounded by a coma, so astronomers also classed it as a periodic comet, 174P. The photos from 2 April show the coma has now spread out.

Echeclus belongs to a group of more than 100 centaurs with orbits well outside the main asteroid belt. Although originally from the distant Kuiper belt, they now orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune, but will be ejected from those unstable orbits within tens of millions of years. Cometary clouds have bee reported around three other centaurs too.

Echeclus is currently moving towards the Sun on its 35-year orbit, and will pass closest to our star - about 880 million km - in April 2015. Other centaurs have become active as they moved inward, Tegler says. But none have shown such dramatic activity.



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Saturn's moon 'best bet for life'

By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus may be the best place to look for life elsewhere in the Solar System.
That is the view of a senior scientist working on the Cassini spacecraft, which has been studying Saturn and its moons for nearly two years.

Dr Bob Brown told a major conference in Vienna, Austria, Enceladus contains simple organic molecules, water and heat, the ingredients for life.

He raised the possibility of future missions to probe inside the moon.

Other research presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting suggests that Enceladus may have a core of molten rock reaching temperatures of 1,400K (above 1,100C).

Jets and rings

In July 2005 Cassini completed a spectacularly close flyby of Enceladus, passing just 173km above its surface.

From this flyby came confirmation that the moon has an atmosphere, and strong evidence that the gases which make up the atmosphere are coming from cracks in the surface, nick-named "tiger stripes", near the south pole.

It appears that the gases are being forced through the surface, as they emerge in jets which shoot upwards for hundreds of kilometres before dispersing, eventually forming Saturn's E-ring.

Most of the gas is water vapour, suggesting strongly that liquid water lies under the moon's icy surface.

From his base at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Bob Brown leads the scientific team for Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (Vims) which analysed the chemical composition of Enceladus's atmosphere and mapped the distribution of various gases.

"We very clearly saw water; there's water everywhere on Enceladus, it's 99.9% water ice in general at the surface, and we've known that for years, so it wasn't a big surprise," he told the BBC News website.

"But when we started looking at our spectra we saw absorption bands from a compound that had to have carbon and hydrogen bonded together.

"And when we mapped the location, it was right in these 'tiger stripes' - right where the jets are coming out, and right where it's hot - and it's pretty hard to imagine it's getting there from anywhere but inside."

The organic molecules appear to be quite simple, he said, probably largely methane.

The jets also contain nitrogen; and putting all this together means, said Dr Brown, that Enceladus contains all the ingredients necessary for the development of life, or of precursors to it.

"What you need to put microbes together of the kind that we're familiar with is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, and water to act as an intermediary for metabolism," he said.

"You've got a rock core that's hot as hell; you've got all the conditions that we think gave rise to the first self-replicating molecules and eventually to life on this planet.

"So Enceladus in a very real sense becomes a stronger candidate for life than [Jupiter's moon] Europa, for instance."

One of the puzzling facets of Enceladus is how and why it is hot enough that it can generate liquid water and spew vapour into space.

Most of its surface has a temperature of about 80 Kelvin (minus 193C). But in the "tiger stripes" it soars to 140 Kelvin (minus 123C), and the interior must be considerably hotter.

Computer models have been produced which try to explain just how hot the interior needs to be, and examine the processes which could produce and maintain the temperatures observed today.

Dr Dennis Matson from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) took EGU delegates through a model which envisages energy coming from two sources, radioactive decay and tidal heating, where differences in the gravitational forces exerted by a nearby body (in this case the giant planet Saturn) cause churning inside the moon, producing heat through friction.

"Down here [in the centre] we have molten magma," he said. "In this model, in the present day, it's entering a cooling phase which may go on for another billion years or so; but at depth you still have high temperatures."

Temperatures at the centre could reach 1,400 Kelvin, he said.

But there are still puzzles. Radioactive decay would have produced the vast majority of its heat shortly after the solar system's formation; somehow, Enceladus has retained some of that energy.

"We think there's a thermostatic mechanism going on in the magma," observed Dr Matson.

If the magma were to cool, he said, it would become more viscous, increasing friction from tidal churning and so producing more heat. But if temperatures veered higher, the magma would flow more easily, and tidal heat production would reduce accordingly.

Exceptional world

Along with all the other Cassini mission findings, the research presented here emphasises what an unexpected treasure trove of scientific novelty researchers have discovered on Enceladus.

Its tiger stripes amount to a "water volcano", the only one seen in the solar system other than on Earth.

Among our neighbours, it is the only known geophysically active world other than Jupiter's moon Io.

But as always with space missions, one set of answers leads to another set of questions.

The way to answer some is a further flyby in about two years' time, shortly before the end of Cassini's scheduled mission, which could take the $3.2bn craft just 25km above the tiger stripes and through their jets.

"There's a little bit of a danger, because observations suggest that the particles get larger as you get in closer," said Dr Brown.

"If they're only 20 or 30 microns [in diameter] they won't hurt the spacecraft; but if they're a millimetre or two, and hit the spacecraft in the wrong place, we're dead."

If there is enough fuel left on board Cassini and enough money in the coffers of its masters, the US, European and Italian space agencies (Nasa, Esa and Asi), the mission may gain an extension to its scheduled life, which could yield further flybys of the tiny moon.

But investigations aimed at looking for self-replicating molecules or even primitive forms of life would have to wait for a further mission.

For Europa, landers have been proposed which would burrow down through the top layer of ice into liquid water below, perhaps using heat from radioactive decay to penetrate the surface.

The same approach could potentially work on Enceladus; but Bob Brown believes there may be another, simpler way in.

"You could target the cracks; they clearly give you a way to get down inside, into the reservoir," he said.

"Now whether we can make something smart enough to do that robotically I don't know. But if there are bugs, they don't have to be in the ocean; they could live inside the vents, they just have to be somewhere where it's hot enough and they have enough energy to conduct metabolism.

"My guess is that if stuff has evolved in this ocean, it's figured out a way to work itself up into these vents; and maybe it's not completely crazy to think some of this stuff is sitting there near the surface."



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NASA Chooses New Spacecraft to Search for Water on Moon

Red Orbit
Monday, 10 April 2006

WASHINGTON -- NASA will send a second spacecraft to the moon with the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled for October 2008. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will travel independent of the orbiter to search for water ice.

The spacecraft, proposed by NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., will fly as a secondary payload on the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle that will launch the orbiter from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
First, the craft will direct the upper stage used to leave Earth orbit to crash into a permanently-shadowed crater at the lunar south pole, creating a plume visible to Earth-based observatories. Next, the satellite will observe the plume and fly through it using several instruments to look for water. Then the satellite will itself become an impactor, creating a second plume visible to lunar-orbiting spacecraft and Earth-based observatories.

"This type of payload is not new to NASA," said Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Scott Horowitz, who made the selection. "We are taking advantage of the payload capability of the launch vehicle to conduct additional high risk/high payoff science to meet Vision for Space Exploration goals. It also signals to our workforce that innovative and competitive, low-cost approaches will be rewarded," he said.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the first of many robotic missions NASA will conduct between 2008 and 2016 to study, map, and learn about the lunar surface to prepare for the return of astronauts to the moon. These early missions will help determine lunar landing sites and whether resources, such as oxygen, hydrogen, and metals, are available for use in NASA's long-term lunar exploration objectives.

NASA's requirements for the secondary payload were that it benefits the robotic lunar program, cost no more than $80 million and not exceed 2,205 pounds (1000 kilograms).

On January 10, 2006, NASA issued a request for information to industry to allow businesses to provide secondary payload concepts to NASA. NASA encouraged its field centers to team with industry to develop proposals. Each NASA center reviewed ideas from industry, as well as secondary payload concepts developed internally. Several proposers, such as the winning spacecraft, took advantage of a new secondary payload adapter developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirkland Air Force Base, N.M.

NASA asked that the concepts advance the Vision for Space Exploration by advancing lunar science, characterizing the lunar environment, and identifying of sites for future human missions NASA was also looking for missions that would advance commercial opportunities and collect engineering data to support the Constellation program, which is developing NASA's new spaceship, the Crew Exploration Vehicle.



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Second from the Sun: European Probe Enters Venus Orbit

By Peter B. de Selding
Space News Staff Writer
11 April 2006

DARMSTADT, Germany -- Europe's Venus Express probe entered orbit around Venus early Tuesday to begin a planned 16-month mission to study a planet on which the greenhouse effect has gone to hellish extremes.
The European Space Agency (ESA) probe fired its main engine today for a 50-minute braking maneuver to allow itself to be captured by the gravitational pull of Venus.

Venus Express managers at ESA's mission control center here had loaded the engine-firing commands to the satellite several days before, and had little more to do than watch their screens and hope the sequence went as planned.

It did. Using large ground antennas located in Australia and Spain, ground teams confirmed that the engine firing was a success. With the satellite 74 million miles (120 million kilometers) from Earth, it took seven minutes for the satellite's signal to reach ground teams, creating some tense moments here as the science and mission teams waited for the satellite's signal.

"It's a great day for ESA," said ESA director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain after Venus Express' successful orbital arrival. "It's a happy day for all of us."

Tense times

During the orbital insertion engine burn, Venus Express' trajectory took it behind its target planet, meaning that for 10 minutes there were no radio signals available to ground teams. The mission control center went silent as ground teams waited to hear the return of the weak S-band signal from the satellite.

"We were sweating for a few minutes," said Manfred Warhaut, Venus Express flight operations for the ESA, in a post-orbit arrival press conference.

Applause followed the confirmation that the signal had been acquired anew. But there were 12 more minutes of engine burn that were needed to further slow the satellite's speed and confirm its capture by Venus.

Mission controllers applauded when the signal confirmed that the engine had completed its burn and shut down, making Venus Express the first dedicated orbiter to study its cloudy target since NASA's Magellan mapping probe plunged into the planet's atmosphere in 1994.

"It's a fantastic moment," said Don McCoy, Venus Express project manager at ESA. "We're finally around Venus. The S-band signal tells us we are in orbit. If we didn't get at least 46 minutes of engine burn, we basically would just fly past the planet."

Venus Express' initial nine-day orbit is designed to be highly elliptical ranging from an altitude of between 248 miles (400 kilometers) and 217,479 miles (350,000 kilometers) above Venus' surface, and gives the probe its only view of the entire planet's disk during its mission, mission managers have said. Two more burns will be conducted in the coming days to bring the orbit into its operational altitude of between 155 miles (250 kilometers) and 41,010 miles (66,000 kilometers).

"This is really a fantastic experience to see that we ended up in exactly the position we wanted to be in," Venus Express project scientist Håkan Svedhem said in the press conference. "Now our work starts."

Launched in November 2005, the ESA's $264 million (220 million euros) Venus Express mission is not expected to begin full operations until mid-May, but mission managers will begin switching the probe's seven observing instruments by Wednesday with the first image to arrive on Thursday, ESA officials said.

A cloudy world

While Venus is about the same age and size as Earth, it is 30 percent closer to the Sun.

Evidence from past satellite missions - the United States and Russia have sent more than a dozen satellites to Venus since the 1960s - shows that Venus once featured surface water.

"We have many questions surrounding Venus," Svedhem said, adding that the planet appears to have shared much in common with Earth during its early days. "Why is Venus the way it is, why is it not like Earth?"

For reasons not yet understood, Venus' atmosphere built up huge amounts of carbon dioxide, which trapped the sun's heat and drive temperatures to around 890 degrees Fahrenheit (477 degrees Celsius). It is an extreme example of the same greenhouse effect that operates on Earth, and scientists want to learn lessons from Venus that might be of use on this planet.

"If you want to find out about things on our own little planet, you have to look out," said David Southwood, ESA's science director.

Venus Express was built by a European consortium led by EADS Astrium, using hardware that was initially designed for Europe's Mars Express satellite. Instruments built for Mars Express and for Europe's Rosetta comet-chaser satellite were reused on Venus Express as well.

Taking advantage of previously used hardware helped speed Venus Express development. It took just three years from the time the manufacturing contract was signed to the launch of the satellite.

Initially designed for a 243-Earth day - or two Venusian day - mission, Venus Express has enough fuel remaining to double its time at the second planet from the Sun thanks to a spot on launch from Earth, mission managers said.

"We have quite a good margin of fuel on board," McCoy said, adding that Venus Express could study its cloudy target for up to six years if its extended mission is approved. "Right from the very instance of separation from our launcher, we've had an excellent trajectory to Venus."



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Daytime Meteor Spotted In Colorado

Vail Daily
07/06/2006

Steve Erickson and his boys have a pretty good view of the night sky. Tuesday, the daytime sky was pretty impressive, too.

As Erickson and his boys Colton, 11, and Cal, 9, were driving back to their home at Horse Mountain Ranch north of Wolcott Tuesday afternoon, they saw something - presumably a meteor - streak across the western sky.

"It was visible across probably a third of the sky, probably from Burns Hole to Muddy Pass," Steve said. "It looked like fireworks. When it separated, it had color to it."

The trail of smoke the meteor left then hung in the sky for several seconds after the thing had disintegrated.

"It was the biggest one I've ever seen," Colton said.

"It was better than seeing one at night," Cal said. "This didn't just streak across the sky and disappear." [...]




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Worldy Weirdness

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For scientist, theory hurricanes will slow doesn't hold water

By ERIC BERGER
The Houston Chronicle
April 8, 2006, 2:57PM

As an increasing cadence of storms with names such as Opal, Mitch, Allison, Ivan and Katrina have battered the Americas during the past decade, hurricane scientists have patiently explained that this was to be expected.

The north Atlantic Ocean, they say, goes through decades-long warming and cooling cycles when it spawns more and fewer hurricanes. The current "active" period for hurricanes began in 1995.

Scientists have dubbed this natural cycle the "Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation," or AMO, and since ocean temperatures have been on the upswing for the past decade, so too has hurricane activity. The seas should settle down again in a decade or two, scientists say.

But what if they're wrong?
One of the world's most prominent hurricane researchers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kerry Emanuel, has proposed a stunning theory that suggests the AMO has a minor effect on hurricanes - and may not even exist at all.

"I'm worried about what the data is telling us," Emanuel said. "It's a pessimistic message, but barring a major (El Niño event), and barring a big volcanic eruption, there just isn't an objective basis for expecting a downturn in Atlantic hurricane activity."

During large El Niño events, when the Pacific Ocean warms, hurricane activity in the Atlantic generally diminishes. Volcanoes spew ash that reduces sunlight, lowering temperatures and likely also diminishing hurricane activity.

The recent upswing in storms is largely because of human-induced climate change, Emanuel contends. The unrelated, noncyclical events that reduce hurricane activity, including volcanic eruptions, have masked a progressive rise in sea temperatures because of global warming, he said.

Emanuel and a handful of other scientists previously have courted controversy with articles suggesting that climate change already is making hurricanes more forceful, with measurably stronger winds.

Global warming debate

This earlier work, especially after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, has ignited a scientific debate about the effect of a warming world on hurricane activity. If there's a general consensus, however, it's that climate change is likely to have some yet unknown effect on tropical storms, and that such an effect would be too small to measure yet.

A majority of scientists think if climate change is affecting hurricanes around the globe, its effect on the North Atlantic basin is minor compared with the influence of the AMO. Indeed, near the end of the record 2005 season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released this statement:

"NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming."

Emanuel first presented his new theory late last month at a hurricanes and climate change conference at Columbia University.

Among those in attendance was Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University who now does much of the research for Bill Gray's seasonal hurricane predictions, the oldest and best-known annual forecast. Klotzbach said he remains unconvinced.

"Dr. Gray and I believe that the AMO plays a large role in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures," he said.

Klotzbach said the data indicates a large increase in tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures in 1994 and 1995. This sudden spike, he said, does not fit well with a greenhouse warming theory that would likely exhibit a smoother trend.

Comment: What if the current greenhouse warming theory is incorrect? After all, it is only a theory.

Other climate scientists who viewed Emanuel's talk admitted, however, that uncertainty exists within the AMO theory. Most agree it's difficult to determine exactly what is driving late summer temperatures in the tropical Atlantic - be it natural climate variability, greenhouse gases or some other factor, such as volcanic eruptions.

Arriving at solid answers is difficult because of limited data. Although reliable sea surface temperature records exist back to the mid-1850s, hurricane records are less reliable. It is difficult for scientists to compare modern accounts of storm frequency and, more importantly, wind speeds with historical records because of vastly more measurements today from satellites, airplanes and sophisticated equipment in the seas.

A modern hurricane's windspeed is measured dozens if not hundreds of times before landfall. The great Galveston storm of 1900 has just one such measurement.

The AMO theory holds that an active period ended in 1900, followed by relative calm until 1930, high activity until about 1970, and calm again until the recent period of higher-than-normal storm activity began in 1995. The oscillation closely tracks the ups and downs in Atlantic sea temperatures.

About a decade ago, a hurricane researcher named Chris Landsea re-examined wind and pressure data for hurricanes from the last active period, between the 1930s and 1960s. He found that the intensity of storms from the era may have been slightly overestimated, and suggested a "bias correction."

Looking for an explanation

Emanuel has seized upon Landsea's correction and inserted it into his measure of a storm's intensity called the "power dissipation index," which estimates the overall destructive potential of a storm.

Emanuel's calculations show a rise in activity to about 1950, followed by a decline to about 1980, then a rapid increase. This does not conform to any AMO, he says. Rather, it follows the entire northern hemispheric temperature record, which shows a similar pattern.

The cooling between 1950 and 1980, he and some other climate scientists say, is a consequence of sulfate aerosols, which blacken the atmosphere and block some sun rays from reaching the Earth's surface.

Landsea, now a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, and Emanuel have sparred about whether the bias correction should be employed in current theories without verification.

Although he says the AMO doesn't explain all of the cyclical nature of hurricanes in the Atlantic, Landsea still thinks the Americas will continue to experience active and inactive periods of storminess.

"I thought his analysis was interesting, but I think it's far from definitive," Landsea said of Emanuel's presentation.

Landsea is leading a collaborative work among hurricane scientists to reanalyze the storm record and try to reach consensus about the data.

For example, the study led to raising 1992's Hurricane Andrew to Category 5 status a decade after it struck land. With better data, Landsea said, perhaps scientists can achieve a final answer on the role of the AMO and hurricanes.

One problem with the AMO idea is that despite the apparent relationship between oscillating sea temperatures, atmospheric changes and hurricane activity, scientists have yet to find an explanation in nature for why such a cycle would exist. There's some thought that it may be because of large-scale circulations of water deep in the oceans, but no one's sure.

For this reason, Florida State University hurricane specialist James Elsner said he finds Emanuel's theory plausible.

But for now, most leading hurricane scientists will continue to adhere to the idea that at some point, storm activity will quiet down again.



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Large ice slab drops on Oakland

By William Brand and Ian Hoffman
STAFF WRITERS04/09/2006 6:43 AM PDT

OAKLAND - Did it come from outer space? Was it a transport vehicle for illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial kind? The tail of a comet grabbed by gravity?

Jokes were flying Saturday morning after a block of solid ice, measuring more than two feet on a side, crashed to earth with a tremendous bang, digging a three-foot hole in the grass at Bushrod Park, 5800 Shattuck Ave.
But when the laughing stopped, an expert theorized it probably fell from the wheel well of a plane landing at Oakland or San Francisco International airports. It also could be an unexplained "ice fall," one expert said. Big balls of ice sometimes fall from the sky without any real explanation.

Wherever it came from, it's arrival was heart-stopping and dramatic.

Brooks and Judith Mencher said they were standing on their back porch on 59th Street near the park when they heard a sound like a very loud rocket. "It kind of went 'whoosh!'" Brooks Mencher said.

The impact hole looked like it was created by a hand grenade, said Oakland Police Sgt. Ron Lighten. "It knocked turf 20 feet away."

Lt. Charles Glass of the Oakland Fire Hazardous Materials Team said the ice was pure water. " It didn't come from a toilet on a plane or anything like that."

Glass said the ice that firefighters pulled from the hole was about the size of the hole, three by three feet and two and a half feet deep. It also broke a ceramic irrigation pipe at the bottom of the hole.

At Oakland International, a spokeswoman said she had no idea if a plane might have been going overhead at that moment. "We'll have to wait until Monday, when that information is available," she said.

Web sites that track commercial flights show a spike in arrivals at Oakland International at about the time, 10:05 a.m., that the ice ball put a hole in Bushrod Park. Two runway approaches for San Francisco International also go almost directly overhead.

An operations manager at the Federal Aviation Administration in Los Angeles said he had never heard of such a thing.

"I've been here 15 years and what usually falls from planes is 'blue ice,' that's methylene glycol. They put it in airplane toilets. Sometimes there are leaks and it falls out," he said.

But Tony Hirsch, a Columbus, Ohio-based aviation expert, said ice falls of pure water are not uncommon: "Ice builds up on airplanes and falls off as they prepare to land."

But Hirsch said the airplane "would have to descend through what we call visible moisture, rain or clouds, for ice to build up." The skies were partly cloudy Saturday morning.

Hirsch said a large chunk of ice could build up on the vertical stabilizer or in a wheel well: "When they lower their landing gear, it falls off."

As bad as Bay Area weather has been, the National Weather Service said none of the storms has been violent enough to hatch a gigantic hailstone on its own. "There's nothing meteorological that would create a piece that big falling into Oakland," said weather service forecaster Diana Henderson.

Electrical engineer Richard Spalding thinks there must be another explanation. He tracks meteors as part of work on satellite instruments and became interested in balls of ice that smash down from time to time.

"Ice falls do happen fairly frequently," Spalding said. "Just about every year, there's a news item somewhere. I think it came from a natural process that we're ignorant of, where it can form at altitude and fall as a chunk," he said.

There's at least one recorded incident of ice from a plane hitting a house. It happened in 2004 in Kent, near Seattle. Homeowner Troy Halte said Saturday a chunk of ice made a basketball size hole in his roof and the ice landed in softball-size pieces on this daughter's bed.

"Fortunately, nobody was home," he said.



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Tokyo Shaken By Magnitude 5.1 Earthquake; No Reports of Damage

April 11 (Bloomberg)

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook central Japan around Tokyo at 5:46 p.m. local time, according to NHK television news. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries from the quake, which was centered near Miyakejima, an island south of the capital, NHK said.
The broadcaster said there is no danger of tsunami, powerful ocean waves caused by seismic activity.

Japan, one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, is located in a zone where the Eurasian, Pacific, Philippine and North American tectonic plates meet and occasionally shift, causing quakes. Quakes of magnitude 5 and more can cause considerable damage.



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Dozens die as accidents take their toll in India, China

Last Updated Mon, 10 Apr 2006 22:38:24 EDT
CBC News

Police say at least 51 people, many of them women and children, died Monday when a fire raged through tents at a consumer trade show in northern India.

And more than 50 more people died in two separate accidents in China.
In India, as many as 160 people were injured when three large cloth tents collapsed in flames on top of those gathered inside to view new stereos, TV sets, washing machines and other appliances.

The trade show was being held in Meerut, a city located in the state of Uttar Pradesh about 80 kilometres northeast of New Delhi.

"Dead bodies are strewn around, most of them are charred beyond recognition," witness Prakash Arya told the Associated Press.

"The bodies were dumped into trucks, jeeps and ambulances and taken away from the public glare."

Witnesses blamed a short circuit that ignited plastic sheeting hung over an air conditioner. They also said many people died because the first tent to catch fire had only one exit.

The late-afternoon blaze at a park in the centre of Meerut was extinguished quickly, authorities said.

Meanwhile, in China an explosion rocked a hospital parking garage, killing at least 27 people.

But the death toll could rise as rescuers remove the rubble of an underground garage, the official Xinhua news agency said .

The employer, Xuangang Coal and Electricity Co. Ltd. in Shanxi province, had "no idea how many people were missing" or what caused the explosion, the news agency said.

Most of the victims were hospital staff and their family members.

Further to the west, in Gansu province, a truck crashed into a minivan and a passenger bus after its brakes failed, killing at least 26 people and injuring 24, Xinhua said. Seven people were killed on the spot and 19 died later.

An additional six people, including a three-year-old child, were seriously injured.



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Stars attend Reeve widow service

Tuesday, 11 April 2006, 07:19 GMT 08:19 UK

Reeve, 44, cared for her husband after he was paralysed in an accident, and led his charity fund. She died of lung cancer in March.

Reeve, a non-smoker all her life, was a singer when she met her husband.
Personalities including Hillary Clinton have attended a memorial service for Dana Reeve, actress and widow of Superman actor Christopher Reeve.

Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was among those at the New York service.

New York senator Mrs Clinton said Reeve was "one of the most exceptional people I have ever known".

Reeve, 44, cared for her husband after he was paralysed in an accident, and led his charity fund. She died of lung cancer in March.

Speaking after the service, Mrs Clinton - wife of former President Bill Clinton - said it had been "a very fitting tribute".

"She had a light within her that was captured by the way people talked about her today, especially her son and stepchildren," she said.

The Producers actor Matthew Broderick said the two-hour private service had been "beautiful but very, very sad".

CNN news presenter Paula Zahn, a long-time friend, said she had not resorted to self-pity after being diagnosed with cancer and "had a positive impact on everyone and everything she touched".

"She really expected to come home," said Zahn. "She truly believed she had more time."

Other celebrities attending included actor and comedian Robin Williams, cyclist Lance Armstrong and US TV presenter Barbara Walters.

Reeve, a non-smoker all her life, was a singer when she met her husband.



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