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Editorial: Ponerology: The Science of Evil Now Available!
Preface to the book Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Political Ponerology may be the most important book you will ever read; in fact, it WILL be. No matter who you are, what your status in life, what your age or sex or nationality or ethnic background, you will, at some point in your life, feel the touch or relentless grip of the cold hand of Evil. Bad things happen to good people, that's a fact.
WHAT is evil? Historically, the question of evil has been a theological one. Generations of theological apologists have written entire libraries of books in an attempt to certify the existence of a Good God that created an imperfect world. Saint Augustine distinguished between two forms of evil: "moral evil", the evil humans do, by choice, knowing that they are doing wrong; and "natural evil", the bad things that just happen - the storm, the flood, volcanic eruptions, fatal disease.
And then, there is what Andrew Lobaczewski calls Macrosocial Evil: large scale evil that overtakes whole societies and nations, and has done so again and again since time immemorial. The history of mankind, when considered objectively, is a terrible thing.
Death and destruction come to all, both rich and poor, free and slave, young and old, good and evil, with an arbitrariness and insouciance that, when contemplated even momentarily, can destroy a normal person's ability to function.
Over and over again, man has seen his fields and cattle laid waste by drought and disease, his loved ones tormented and decimated by illness or human cruelty, his life's work reduced to nothing in an instant by events over which he has no control at all.
The study of history through its various disciplines offers a view of mankind that is almost insupportable. The rapacious movements of hungry tribes, invading and conquering and destroying in the darkness of prehistory; the barbarian invaders of the civilized world during medieval times, the bloodbaths of the crusades of Catholic Europe against the infidels of the Middle East and then the "infidels" who were their own brothers: the stalking noonday terror of the Inquisition where martyrs quenched the flames with their blood. Then, there is the raging holocaust of modern genocide; wars, famine, and pestilence striding across the globe in hundred league boots; and never more frightening than today.
All of these things produce an intolerable sense of indefensibility against what Mircea Eliade calls the Terror of History.
There are those who will say that NOW this is all past; mankind has entered a new phase; science and technology have brought us to the brink of ending all this suffering. Many people believe that man is evolving; society is evolving; and that we now have control over the arbitrary evil of our environment; or at least we will have it after George Bush and his Neocons have about 25 years to fight the Endless War against Terror. Anything that does not support this idea is reinterpreted or ignored.
Science has given us many wonderful gifts: the space program, laser, television, penicillin, sulfa-drugs, and a host of other useful developments which should make our lives more tolerable and fruitful. However, we can easily see that this is not the case. It it could be said that never before has man been so precariously poised on the brink of such total destruction.
On a personal level, our lives are steadily deteriorating. The air we breathe and the water we drink is polluted almost beyond endurance. Our foods are loaded with substances which contribute very little to nourishment, and may, in fact, be injurious to our health. Stress and tension have become an accepted part of life and can be shown to have killed more people than the cigarettes that some people still smoke to relieve it. We swallow endless quantities of pills to wake up, go to sleep, get the job done, calm our nerves and make us feel good. The inhabitants of the earth spend more money on recreational drugs than they spend on housing, clothing, food, education or any other product or service.
At the social level, hatred, envy, greed and strife multiply exponentially. Crime increases nine times faster than the population. Combined with wars, insurrections, and political purges, multiplied millions of people across the globe are without adequate food or shelter due to political actions.
And then, of course, drought, famine, plague and natural disasters still take an annual toll in lives and suffering. This, too, seems to be increasing.
When man contemplates history, AS IT IS, he is forced to realize that he is in the iron grip of an existence that seems to have no real care or concern for his pain and suffering. Over and over again, the same sufferings fall upon mankind multiplied millions upon millions of times over millennia. The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing. I could write until the end of the world using oceans of ink and forests of paper, and never fully convey this Terror. The beast of arbitrary calamity has always been with us. For as long as human hearts have pumped hot blood through their too-fragile bodies and glowed with the inexpressible sweetness of life and yearning for all that is good and right and loving, the sneering, stalking, drooling and scheming beast of unconscious evil has licked its lips in anticipation of its next feast of terror and suffering. Since the beginning of time, this mystery of the estate of man, this Curse of Cain has existed. And, since the Ancient of Days, the cry has been: My punishment is greater than I can bear!
It is conjectured that, in ancient times, when man perceived this intolerable and incomprehensible condition in which he found his existence, that he created cosmogonies to justify all the cruelties, aberrations, and tragedies of history. It is true that, man, as a rule and in general, is powerless against cosmic and geological catastrophes, and it has long been said that the average man can't really do anything about military onslaughts, social injustice, personal and familial misfortunes, and a host of assaults against his existence too numerous to list.
This is about to change. Political Ponerology by Andrzej Lobaczewski is going to give you answers to many of the questions about Evil in our world. This book is not just about macrosocial evil, it is also about everyday evil because, in a very real sense, the two are inseparable. The long term accumulation of everyday evil always and inevitably leads to Grand Systemic Evil that destroys more innocent people than any other phenomenon on this planet.
Political Ponerology is also a survival guide. As I said above, this book will be the most important book you will ever read. Unless, of course, you are a psychopath.
"What does psychopathy have to do with personal or social evil?" you may ask.
Absolutely everything. Whether you know it or not, each and every day your life is touched by the effects of psychopathy on our world. You are about to learn that even if there isn't much we can do about geological and cosmological catastrophe, there is a lot we can do about social and macrosocial evil, and the very first thing to do is to learn about it. In the case of psychopathy and its effects on our world, what you don't know definitely can and will hurt you.
Nowadays the word "psychopath" generally evokes images of the barely restrained - yet surprisingly urbane - mad-dog serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter of "Silence of the Lambs" fame. I will admit that this was the image that came to my mind whenever I heard the word; almost, that is. The big difference was that I never thought of a psychopath as possibly being so cultured or so capable of passing as "normal." But I was wrong, and I was to learn this lesson quite painfully by direct experience. The exact details are chronicled elsewhere; what is important is that this experience was probably one of the most painful and instructive episodes of my life and it enabled me to overcome a block in my awareness of the world around me and those who inhabit it.
Regarding blocks to awareness, I need to state for the record that I have spent 30 years studying psychology, history, culture, religion, myth and the so-called paranormal . I also have worked for many years with hypnotherapy - which gave me a very good mechanical knowledge of how the mind/brain of the human being operates at very deep levels. But even so, I was still operating with certain beliefs firmly in place that were shattered by my research into psychopathy. I realized that there was a certain set of ideas that I held about human beings that were sacrosanct - and false. I even wrote about this once in the following way:
...my work has shown me that the vast majority of people want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so! With the majority of people having this internal desire, why the Hell isn't it happening?
I was naïve, I admit. There were many things I did not know that I have learned since I penned those words. But even at that time I was aware of how our own minds can be used to deceive us.
Now, what beliefs did I hold that made me a victim of a psychopath? The first and most obvious one is that I truly believed that deep inside, all people are basically "good" and that they "want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so..."
As it happens, this is not true as I - and everyone involved in our research group - learned to our sorrow, as they say. But we also learned to our edification. In order to come to some understanding of exactly what kind of human being could do the things that were done to me (and others close to me), and why they might be motivated - even driven - to behave this way, we began to research the psychology literature for clues because we needed to understand for our own peace of mind.
If there is a psychological theory that can explain vicious and harmful behavior, it helps very much for the victim of such acts to have this information so that they do not have to spend all their time feeling hurt or angry. And certainly, if there is a psychological theory that helps a person to find what kind of words or deeds can bridge the chasm between people, to heal misunderstandings, that is also a worthy goal. It was from such a perspective that we began our extensive work on the subjects of narcissism which then led to the study of psychopathy.
Of course, we didn't start out with such any such "diagnosis" or label for what we were witnessing. We started out with observations and searched the literature for clues, for profiles, for anything that would help us to understand the inner world of a human being - actually a group of human beings - who seemed to be utterly depraved and unlike anything we had ever encountered before. We found that this kind of human is all too common and that, according to some of the latest research, they cause more damage in human society than any other single so-called "mental illness." Martha Stout, who has worked extensively with victims of psychopaths, writes:
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.
You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]
Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....
The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly high," is about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.
We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.
Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions.
We did not have the advantage of Dr. Stout's book at the beginning of our research project. We did, of course, have Robert Hare and Hervey Cleckley and Guggenbuhl-Craig and others. But they were only approaching the subject of the possibly large numbers of psychopaths that live among us who never get caught breaking laws, who don't murder - or if they do, they don't get caught - and who still do untold damage to the lives of family, acquaintances, and strangers.
Most mental health experts, for a very long time, have operated on the premise that psychopaths come from impoverished backgrounds and have experienced abuse of one sort or another in childhood, so it is easy to spot them, or at least, they certainly don't move in society except as interlopers. This idea seems to be coming under some serious revision lately. As Lobaczewski points out in this book, there is some confusion between Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder and Sociopathy. As Robert Hare points out, yes, there are many psychopaths who are also "anti-socials" but there seem to be far more of them that would never be classified as anti-social or sociopathic! In other words, they can be doctors, lawyers, judges, policemen, congressmen, presidents of corporations that rob from the poor to give to the rich, and even presidents.
In a recent paper, it is suggested that psychopathy may exist in ordinary society in even greater numbers than anyone has thus far considered:
"Psychopathy, as originally conceived by Cleckley (1941), is not limited to engagement in illegal activities, but rather encompasses such personality characteristics as manipulativeness, insincerity, egocentricity, and lack of guilt - characteristics clearly present in criminals but also in spouses, parents, bosses, attorneys, politicians, and CEOs, to name but a few. (Bursten, 1973; Stewart, 1991). Our own examination of the prevalence of psychopathy within a university population suggested that perhaps 5% or more of this sample might be deemed psychopathic, although the vast majority of those will be male (more than 1/10 males versus approximately 1?100 females).
"As such, psychopathy may be characterized ... as involving a tendency towards both dominance and coldness. Wiggins (1995) in summarizing numerous previous findings... indicates that such individuals are prone to anger and irritation and are willing to exploit others. They are arrogant, manipulative, cynical, exhibitionistic, sensation -seeking, Machiavellian, vindictive, and out for their own gain. With respect to their patterns of social exchange (Foa & Foa, 1974), they attribute love and status to themselves, seeing themselves as highly worthy and important, but prescribe neither love nor status to others, seeing them as unworthy and insignificant. This characterization is clearly consistent with the essence of psychopathy as commonly described.
"The present investigation sought to answer some basic questions regarding the construct of psychopathy in non forensic settings... In so doing we have returned to Cleckley's (1941) original emphasis on psychopathy as a personality style not only among criminals, but also among successful individuals within the community.
"What is clear from our findings is that (a) psychopathy measures have converged on a prototype of psychopathy that involves a combination of dominant and cold interpersonal characteristics; (b) psychopathy does occur in the community and at what might be a higher than expected rate; and (c) psychopathy appears to have little overlap with personality disorders aside from Antisocial Personality Disorder. ...
"Clearly, where much more work is needed is in understanding what factors differentiate the abiding (although perhaps not moral-abiding) psychopath from the law-breaking psychopath; such research surely needs to make greater use of non forensic samples than has been customary in the past."
Lobaczewski discusses the fact that there are different types of psychopaths. One type, in particular, is the most deadly of all: the Essential Psychopath. He doesn't give us a "checklist" but rather discusses what is inside the psychopath. His description meshes very well with items in the paper quoted above.
Martha Stout also discusses the fact that psychopaths, like anyone else, are born with different basic likes and dislikes and desires which is why some of them are doctors and presidents and others are petty thieves or rapists.
"Likeable," "Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring," and "A great success with the ladies". This is how Hervey Cleckley described most of his subjects in "The Mask of Sanity." It seems that, in spite of the fact that their actions prove them to be "irresponsible," "self-destructive," psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The smooth self-assurance acts as an almost supernatural magnet to normal people who have to read self-help books or go to counseling to be able to interact with others in an untroubled way. The psychopath, on the contrary, never has any neuroses, no self-doubts, never experiences angst, and is what "normal" people seek to be. What's more, even if they aren't that attractive, they are "babe magnets."
Cleckley's seminal hypothesis is that the psychopath suffers from profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. He is able to do whatever he wants, based on whatever whim strikes him because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a horror or a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience.
Cleckley posits that psychopathy is quite common in the community at large. His cases include examples of psychopaths who generally function normally in the community as businessmen, doctors, and even psychiatrists. Nowadays, some of the more astute researchers see criminal psychopathy - often referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of a particular personality type. I think it is more helpful to characterize criminal psychopaths as "unsuccessful psychopaths."
One researcher, Alan Harrington goes so far as to say that the psychopath is the new man being produced by the evolutionary pressures of modern life.
Certainly, there have always been shysters and crooks, but past concern was focused on ferreting out incompetents rather than psychopaths. Unfortunately, all that has changed. We now need to fear the super-sophisticated modern crook who does know what he is doing ... and does it so well that no one else knows. Yes, psychopaths love the business world.
"Uninvolved with others, he coolly saw into their fears and desires, and maneuvered them as he wished. Such a man might not, after all, be doomed to a life of scrapes and escapades ending ignominiously in the jailhouse. Instead of murdering others, he might become a corporate raider and murder companies, firing people instead of killing them, and chopping up their functions rather than their bodies."
[T]he consequences to the average citizen from business crimes are staggering. As criminologist Georgette Bennett says, "They account for nearly 30% of case filings in U.S. District Courts - more than any other category of crime. The combined burglary, mugging and other property losses induced by the country's street punks come to about $4 billion a year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our corporate board rooms and the humble clerks in our retail stores bilk us out of between $40 and $200 billion a year."
Concern here is that the costume for the new masked sanity of a psychopath is just as likely to be a three-piece suit as a ski mask and a gun. As Harrington says, "We also have the psychopath in respectable circles, no longer assumed to be a loser." He quotes William Krasner as saying, "They - psychopath and part psychopath - do well in the more unscrupulous types of sales work, because they take such delight in 'putting it over on them', getting away with it - and have so little conscience about defrauding their customers." Our society is fast becoming more materialistic, and success at any cost is the credo of many businessmen. The typical psychopath thrives in this kind of environment and is seen as a business "hero."
The study of "ambulatory" psychopaths - what we call "The Garden Variety Psychopath" - has, however, hardly begun. Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. Some researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is important to study psychopathy not as a pathological category but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human.
Hervey Cleckly actually comes very close to suggesting that psychopaths are human in every respect - but that they lack a soul. This lack of "soul quality" makes them very efficient "machines." They can write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions. They are the type of person who can claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party "to forget." The problem is: they really DO forget.
Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from others support for what they want. In this way, many psychopaths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only over time that their associates become aware of the fact that their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating the rights of others. "Even when they are indifferent to the rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings of trust and confidence."
The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change.
Andrew Lobaczewski addresses the problem of the psychopath and their extremely significant contribution to our macrosocial evils, their ability to act as the éminence grise behind the very structure of our society. It is very important to keep in mind that this influence comes from a relatively small segment of humanity. The other 90 some percent of human beings are not psychopaths.
But that 90 percent of normal people know that something is wrong! They just can't quite identify it; can't quite put their finger on it; and because they can't, they tend to think that there is nothing they can do about it, or maybe it is just God punishing people.
What is actually the case is that when that 90 some percent of human beings fall into a certain state, as Lobaczewski will describe, the psychopaths, like a virulent pathogen in a body, strike at the weaknesses and the entire society is plunged into conditions that always and inevitably lead to horror and tragedy on a very large scale.
The movie, "The Matrix," touched a deep chord in society because it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are unable to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone around them who "looks human" is, in fact, just like them - emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.
To give an example of how psychopaths can directly affect society at large: the "legal argument" as explicated by Robert Canup in his work on the "Socially Adept Psychopath." The legal argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. We believe that the legal argument is an advanced system of justice. This is a very cunning trick that has been foisted on normal people by psychopaths in order to have an advantage over them. Just think about it for a moment: the legal argument amounts to little more than the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Because this "legal argument" system has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immediately. But here's how it works.
Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other human beings are - at the very least - trying to "do right" and "be good" and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a person who has entered our life is, in fact, a "good person." When a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the legal argument assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or wrong. Because of our exposure to the "legal argument" norms, when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, application of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal argument might be helpful.
Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess "I did it." But lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that "I didn't do it," and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent person he has accused is saying "I didn't do it," and is actually telling the truth.
The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if the innocent person is honest and admits his mistakes.
The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars - psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is a useless farce. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar.
It has often been noted that psychopaths have a distinct advantage over human beings with conscience and feelings because the psychopath does not have conscience and feelings. What seems to be so is that conscience and feelings are related to the abstract concepts of "future" and "others." It is "spatio-temporal." We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and so on because we can IMAGINE in an abstract way, the future based on our own experiences in the past, or even just "concepts of experiences" in myriad variations. We can "see ourselves" in them even though they are "out there" and this evokes feelings in us. We can't do something hurtful because we can imagine it being done to us and how it would feel. In other words, we can not only identify with others spatially - so to say - but also temporally - in time.
The psychopath does not seem to have this capacity.
They are unable to "imagine" in the sense of being able to really connect to images in a direct "self connecting to another self" sort of way.
Oh, indeed, they can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have - the thing that drives them and causes them to act out different dramas for the effect - is a sort of "predatorial hunger" for what they want. That is to say, they "feel" need/want as love, and not having their needs/wants met is described by them as "not being loved". What is more, this "need/want" perspective posits that only the "hunger" of the psychopath is valid, and anything and everything "out there," outside of the psychopath, is not real except insofar as it has the capability of being assimilated to the psychopath as a sort of "food." "Can it be used or can it provide something?" is the only issue about which the psychopath seems to be concerned. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive.
In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them out of the herd, get close to them and reduce their resistance, so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camouflage composed of words and appearances - lies and manipulations - in order to "assimilate" their prey.
This leads us to an important question: what does the psychopath REALLY get from their victims? It's easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances, such as love relationships or faked friendships, it is not so easy to see what the psychopath is after. Without wandering too far afield into spiritual speculations - a problem Cleckley also faced - we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath ENJOYS making others suffer. Just as normal humans enjoy seeing other people happy, or doing things that make other people smile, the psychopath enjoys the exact opposite.
Anyone who has ever observed a cat playing with a mouse before killing and eating it has probably explained to themselves that the cat is just "entertained" by the antics of the mouse and is unable to conceive of the terror and pain being experienced by the mouse, and the cat, therefore, is innocent of any evil intent. The mouse dies, the cat is fed, and that is nature. Psychopaths don't generally eat their victims.
Yes, in extreme cases of psychopathy, the entire cat and mouse dynamic is carried out. Cannibalism has a long history wherein it was assumed that certain powers of the victim could be assimilated by eating some particular part of them. But in ordinary life, psychopaths don't normally go all the way, so to say. This causes us to look at the cat and mouse scenario again with different eyes. Now we ask: is it too simplistic to think that the innocent cat is merely entertained by the mouse running about and frantically trying to escape? Is there something more to this dynamic than meets the eye? Is there something more than being "entertained" by the antics of the mouse trying to flee? After all, in terms of evolution, why would such behavior be hard-wired into the cat? Is the mouse tastier because of the chemicals of fear that flood his little body? Is a mouse frozen with terror more of a "gourmet" meal?
This suggests that we ought to revisit our ideas about psychopaths with a slightly different perspective. One thing we do know is this: many people who experience interactions with psychopaths and narcissists report feeling "drained" and confused and often subsequently experience deteriorating health. Does this mean that part of the dynamic, part of the explanation for why psychopaths will pursue "love relationships" and "friendships" that ostensibly can result in no observable material gain, is because there is an actual energy consumption?
We do not know the answer to this question. We observe, we theorize, we speculate and hypothesize. But in the end, only the individual victim can determine what they have lost in the dynamic - and it is often far more than material goods. In a certain sense, it seems that psychopaths are soul eaters or "Psychophagic."
In the past several years, there are many more psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental health workers beginning to look at these issues in new ways in response to the questions about the state of our world and the possibility that there is some essential difference between such individuals as George W. Bush and many so-called Neocons, and the rest of us.
Dr. Stout's book has one of the longest explanations as to why none of her examples resemble any actual persons that I have ever read. And then, in a very early chapter, she describes a "composite" case where the subject spent his childhood blowing up frogs with fire-crackers. It is widely known that George W. Bush did this, so one naturally wonders...
In any event, even without Dr. Stout's work, at the time we were studying the matter, we realized that what we were learning was very important to everyone because as the data was assembled, we saw that the clues, the profiles, revealed that the issues we were facing were faced by everyone at one time or another, to one extent or another. We also began to realize that the profiles that emerged also describe rather accurately many individuals who seek positions of power in fields of authority, most particularly politics and commerce. That's really not so surprising an idea, but it honestly hadn't occurred to us until we saw the patterns and recognized them in the behaviors of numerous historical figures, and lately including George W. Bush and members of his administration.
Current day statistics tell us that there are more psychologically sick people than healthy ones. If you take a sampling of individuals in any given field, you are likely to find that a significant number of them display pathological symptoms to one extent or another. Politics is no exception, and by its very nature, would tend to attract more of the pathological "dominator types" than other fields. That is only logical, and we began to realize that it was not only logical, it was horrifyingly accurate; horrifying because pathology among people in power can have disastrous effects on all of the people under the control of such pathological individuals. And so, we decided to write about this subject and publish it on the Internet.
As the material went up, letters from our readers began to come in thanking us for putting a name to what was happening to them in their personal lives as well as helping them to understand what was happening in a world that seems to have gone completely mad. We began to think that it was an epidemic and in a certain sense, we were right. If an individual with a highly contagious illness works in a job that puts them in contact with the public, an epidemic is the result. In the same way, if an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic. Our ideas along this line were soon to receive confirmation from an unexpected source: Andrew Lobaczewski, the author of the book you are about to read. I received an email as follows:
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.
I have got your Special Research Project on psychopathy by my computer. You are doing a most important and valuable work for the future of nations.[...]
I am a very aged clinical psychologist. Forty years ago I took part in a secret investigation of the real nature and psychopathology of the macro-social phenomenon called "Communism". The other researchers were the scientists of the previous generation who are now passed away.
The profound study of the nature psychopathy, which played the essential and inspirational part in this macro-social psychopathologic phenomenon, and distinguishing it from other mental anomalies, appeared to be the necessary preparation for understanding the entire nature of the phenomenon.
The large part of the work, you are doing now, was done in those times. ...
I am able to provide you with a most valuable scientific document, useful for your purposes. It is my book "POLITICAL PONEROLOGY - A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes". You may also find copy of this book in the Library of Congress and in some university and public libraries in the USA.
Be so kind and contact me so that I may mail a copy to you.
Very truly yours!
Andrew M. £obaczewski
I promptly wrote a reply saying yes, I would very much like to read his book. A couple of weeks later the manuscript arrived in the mail.
As I read, I realized that what I was holding in my hand was essentially a chronicle of a descent into hell, transformation, and triumphant return to the world with knowledge of that hell that was priceless for the rest of us, particularly in this day and time when it seems evident that a similar hell is enveloping the planet. The risks that were taken by the group of scientists that did the research on which this book is based are beyond the comprehension of most of us.
Many of them were young, just starting in their careers when the Nazis began to stride in their hundred league jackboots across Europe. These researchers lived through that, and then when the Nazis were driven out and replaced by the Communists under the heel of Stalin, they faced years of oppression the likes of which those of us today who are choosing to take a stand against the Bush Reich cannot even imagine. But, based on the syndrome that describes the onset of the disease, it seems that the United States, in particular, and perhaps the entire world, will soon enter into "bad times" of such horror and despair that the Holocaust of World War II will seem like just a practice run.
And so, since they were there, and they lived through it and brought back information to the rest of us, it may well save our lives to have a map to guide us in the falling darkness.
- Order your copy now! -
For more on Political Ponerology, don't miss our podcast entitled The 6% Solution!!
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Editorial: Helping George
Artie Shaw & Tom Hat
(Click image to view)
A group of George's Texas cronies decide to help out their friend....
Aussi en français !
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Hydrocarbon Hysteria
Feds propose $100 million hydrogen prize
By Anne Broache
CNET News.com
April 27, 2006
WASHINGTON--Rising gas prices have sparked a new proposal in Congress that would pony up millions of taxpayer dollars to reward hydrogen energy breakthroughs.
Backed primarily by Republicans, the H-Prize Act of 2006 would create three categories of prizes to be awarded over the next decade, including a $100 million berth for "transformational changes in technologies for the distribution or production of hydrogen that meet or exceed far-reaching objective criteria." It would be up to the U.S. Department of Energy to designate an independent, non-governmental organization to set the contest's rules and pick its judges.
Smaller awards of up to $1 million would be distributed every other year to inventions in four categories: hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and utilization. In alternate years, one prize of up to $4 million would go to those who achieve prototypes of hydrogen-powered vehicles or other products that meet certain predetermined benchmarks.
"To those that missed the national security implications of our current posture and reliance on a fuel source that we don't control, I would encourage them to think beyond the possibility that maybe the market can come up with a solution to that," Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican and the bill's chief sponsor, said at a morning hearing here of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee. "Perhaps there's a role for government in getting us as quickly as possible beyond that danger point."
The measure draws inspiration from what supporters deem a proven track record of breakthroughs driven by prizes. They credited a $25,000 prize offered in 1919 by French businessman Raymond Orteig for bringing stardom to then-unknown pilot Charles Lindbergh and his pioneering transatlantic airplane flight--and more importantly, igniting the nation's interest in aviation. More recently, 26 teams from seven countries competed for the $10-million Ansari X-Prize, granted to the first privately funded team to devise a three-person, reusable spacecraft that could fly to 100 kilometers above the Earth.
X-Prize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis said prizes work because, if done well, they attract a flurry of outside attention from people in a variety of fields who aren't necessarily inclined to deal with the bureaucracy involved in federal research grants. "That allows the most brilliant, sometimes the most radical, thinkers to enter and solve the problems we have," he told the politicians.
President Bush has already made research on viable hydrogen fuel-cell cars a major part of his energy policy agenda. Congress earmarked $136 million specifically for such research in 2006, down from $149 million in 2005.
The technology's expense, however, remains a major hurdle. According to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy, hydrogen would cost three or four times more than gasoline. Fuel cells cost at least five times as much as standard combustion engines and aren't nearly as durable. It's also proving tough to build hydrogen storage systems that can hold enough fuel to travel more than 300 miles without taking up too much space in the vehicle.
"We need independent scientific breakthroughs in each of these three areas," David Greene, a corporate fellow at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told politicians.
Greene said he believed the prizes would "increase the likelihood" of such advancements occurring but strongly cautioned the committee against using those incentives as a substitute for research and development investments. The existing bill contains a section that says the prizes "shall not be considered" such a substitute.
But some members suggested that's an impossible goal given the current federal budget situation. "Neither president nor Congress is going to be able to find the money for such a prize without taking money out of other vital energy research and development programs," said Rep. Judy Biggert, an Illinois Republican. All told, the bill calls for $55 million each year between 2007 and 2016 to run the program.
"One of the things we hear about is the huge profits made by the oil and gas industry, so why not use the profits to pay for something such as a prize?" Biggert asked Phillip Baxley, president of Shell Hydrogen, who testified at the committee hearing in favor of the bill. The bill does not prohibit private companies or individuals from contributing to the prize money and, in fact, suggests such an approach.
Baxley said Shell would be interested in sponsoring a prize but suggested the initial federal "seed money" would put a spotlight on the importance of hydrogen research.
Rep. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, said he was concerned about singling out hydrogen when the nation should be exploring myriad ways to ensure its energy independence. Perhaps an "E-Prize," or energy prize, would be more appropriate, he suggested.
"Why are we not doing more about conservation?" he asked. "Are we biasing our energy approach by focusing this prize and so much that we're doing on the hydrogen economy?"
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BS Alert: US Lawmakers Support Green technologies
AP
Thu Apr 27, 2006
House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Ill., center, gets out of a Hydrogen Alternative Fueled automobile, left, as he prepares to board his SUV, which uses gasoline, after holding a new conference at a local gas station in Washington, Thursday, April 27, 2006 to discuss the recent rise in gas prices. Hastert and other members of Congress drove off in the Hydrogen-Fueled cars only to switch to their official cars to drive back the few block back to the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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Bush seeks hikes in passenger car fuel standards
Reuters
April 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration formally asked Congress on Thursday for authority to overhaul fuel economy standards for passenger cars, which have not changed in 16 years.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said in a letter to House and Senate leaders that the step was needed to lessen dependency on imported oil.
The administration in March upped fuel standards for sport utility vehicles and pickups to 24.1 miles per gallon by 2011. Cars must now average 27.5 mpg.
Comment: By 2011, it will be far too late...
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Oilman In Chief
Frank O'Donnell
OneWorld.net
April 26, 2006
You know President George W. Bush's ratings are in the toilet when he starts bashing oil companies in the name of protecting what he repeatedly called "our consumers," as he did yesterday.
And you know the Party in Power-just back from getting an earful from angry constituents about rising gasoline prices-is shaking in its shoes at the prospect of tomorrow's (April 27) profit announcement by ExxonMobil.
So the president did what a floundering politician does: he tried to change the subject.
In this case, the president made the environment a scapegoat for rising gasoline prices. He suggested a false choice-lower prices at the pump, or dirtier air.
It was ironic that the president made his gas-price speech before the Renewable Fuels Association, since the president was citing the association's main product, ethanol, as one of the many reasons that gasoline prices have gone up. Actually, most of the price of gasoline is determined by world crude oil prices, and the presidential saber rattling over Iran hasn't helped that. But it's unlikely the president will make a speech in Tehran anytime soon.
Regarding clean air requirements, the president noted that some state officials are requesting temporary waivers of clean-gasoline standards as a means of reducing price pressure. (Pennsylvania requested a waiver earlier this week for gasoline sold in the Philadelphia area.)
A short-term waiver isn't the worst possible outcome, as long as it is extremely limited. But health and environmental groups should and will protest any effort to make long-term weakening changes to gasoline standards.
The real truth is that oil companies could have anticipated this problem and planned for it better. Instead, they are taking advantage of a situation they helped create.
Compare the following presidential myths to the reality:
Myth #1: Clean air standards must be relaxed.
Bush:
Under federal quality-air quality laws, some areas of the country are required to use fuel blend called reformulated gasoline. Now, as you well know, this year we're going-undergoing a rapid transition in the primary ingredient in reformulated gas-from MTBE to ethanol...
Yet state and local officials in some parts of our country worry about supply disruption for the short term. They worry about the sudden change from MTBE to ethanol-the ethanol producers won't be able to meet the demand. And that's causing the price of gasoline to go up some amount in their jurisdictions.
And some have contacted us to determine whether or not they can ask the EPA to waive local fuel requirements on a temporary basis ... So I'm directing EPA Administrator Johnson to use all his available authority to grant waivers that would relieve critical fuel supply shortages. And I do that for the sake of our consumers.
Reality:
In last year's energy bill, Congress actually eliminated the requirement that cleaner reformulated gasoline contain MTBE or ethanol. MTBE makers-including ExxonMobil-decided to stop shipping its product after Congress refused to give them a deal absolving these big water polluters from product liability lawsuits. But the companies have known about that congressional decision for nearly a year. They could have arranged a smoother transition to new gasoline blends. But scarcity drives up prices-and oil profits.
Myth #2: Environmental requirements have blocked oil companies from building new refineries.
Bush:
There has not been a new refinery built in America in 30 years.
Reality:
In declaring that part of the problem is that we haven't built new refineries in the U.S. in decades, the president is being simply disingenuous. As he well knows from his days in the business, the big oil companies decided for economic reasons that it was more cost-effective to expand existing refineries than build new ones. In fact, they have managed those expansions to avoid a gasoline glut that could lead to lower prices.
Myth #3: Some mythical entity has created "boutique fuels" around the nation.
Bush:
The number of boutique fuels has expanded rapidly over the years, and America now has an uncoordinated and overly complex set of fuel rules ... I want to simplify the process for the sake of our consumers.
Reality:
Some states have adopted specialized fuels-usually at the request of the oil industry, which has frequently argued in favor of such fuels instead of cleaner gasoline. The oil industry has frequently profited by this seeming confusion.
In last year's energy bill, Congress limited the number of future blends. But the oil industry has not offered to return any of the associated profits to consumers.
The president and Republican-led Congress could have seen the rising gas prices coming miles away. The time to worry about it was last year when they were writing the monster energy bill, loaded with subsidies to energy companies. That's when concrete steps could have been taken to wean America from its oil addiction. Instead, the president is exploiting the public's anxiety over gas prices to advance his own oil-driven energy agenda.
Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch , a 501(c)3 nonpartisan, nonprofit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act.
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Big-Mouth Bush Told Clinton How To Handle OPEC
by Evelyn Pringle
OpEdNews.com
April 27, 2006
While on the campaign trail in 2000, Bush told President Bill Clinton how to handle OPEC, in public no less. "What I think the president ought to do," he said, "is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots."
And in a brilliant, highly educational follow-up comment, Bush informed the audience: "One reason why the price is so high is because the price of crude oil has been driven up."
"OPEC has gotten its supply act together," Bush advised listeners, "and it's driving the price, like it did in the past."
"And," he said in direct advice to Clinton, "the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the prices."
Apparently, Bush has lost the phone numbers for OPEC members, or they are refusing to take his calls, because I think its safe to assume that he did not "jawbone" members of the OPEC cartel.
That said, if Bush is not in the mood for "jawboning," he could at least use a little pillow talk with his buddies in Saudi Arabia and get them to open the spigots.
During campaign 2000, Bush told Americans that he had an energy plan that would reduce gas prices at the pumps and here we sit 5 years later, with the highest prices in history.
The high energy costs are affecting everyone, from commuters and consumers, to public and private programs. The damage is devastating everywhere.
Since Bush took office, gas prices have increased 62.5% from $1.44 per gallon in January 2001 to $2.34 in March 2006. The average household with children will spend about $3,343 on transportation fuel costs this year, an increase of 75% since 2001, according to the Energy Information Administration, Retail Gasoline Prices, and Household Vehicle Energy Use: Latest Data and Trends, November 2005.
And gas prices are still rising. As of April 24, 2006, the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge report said, nationally, the average price for a gallon of regular gas was $2.90, or a 15.5% hike over the $2.51 price per gallon a month ago.
So where is all the money going? One need not look far. In 2005, the world's largest oil company, ExxonMobil, reported the most profitable year in US corporate history, earning more than $36 billion.
Economists say oil producers and refiners, not gas stations, are making a killing. The five largest refineries, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Valero, and British Petroleum (BP) have recorded $228 billion in profits since 2001, according to testimony at a congressional hearing last November.
In 1999, refiners made 23 cents for each gallon processed and in 2004, they made 41 cents a gallon, according to Department of Energy data.
While watching oil company profits skyrocket, the average American household spent about $107 more for heating this past winter compared to the year before. In 2005-06, households heating with natural gas paid $402, or 86% more than they paid in 2001-2002. Consumers of heating oil paid $759, or 121% more this winter than they paid in 2001-2002, according to the Energy Information Administration, Short Term Energy Outlook, April 2006.
Family budgets, already strained by the rising cost of health care and health insurance, including higher co-payments and deductibles, as well as prescription drugs, college tuition, and other everyday expenses, are being stretched to the limit.
Energy costs are largely responsible for the declining real wages of working people. With the ever-rising cost of gasoline, employees are seeing their paychecks dwindle by the simple fact that they have to drive back and forth to work.
For many low-income families, gas now burns through 10% of household income. In Wisconsin, according to Consumer News, pawn shops are reporting brisk business as people hock their belongings to raise money for gas.
But it is not only the poor who are affected, a majority of the population is taking a hit. Students cannot afford to drive to school. Owners of recreational vehicles, faced with paying more than $200 to fill up the gas tank, are rethinking vacation trips.
"It's taking food off my table," James of Alexandria, VA told Consumer News. "I am having trouble and I'm late paying my daughter's tuition. No vacation this year. I'm charging gas on my credit card because I don't have $50 to put 20 gallons of gas in my car," he said.
Local governments, already struggling to pay for essential services due to continuous cuts in Federal funding, are overwhelmed in trying to keep school buses, police cars, fire trucks, and other public vehicles on the road.
Senior citizens are already strapped by the extra costs of trying to keep their homes heated, and now the Meals on Wheels program is having trouble delivering food to their homes due to high gas prices.
Rising fuel costs are forcing city and county officials all across the country to boost budgets, cut back on social programs that rely on transportation and scrutinize vehicle use.
For 2005, the Appleton, Wisconsin city budget estimated fuel costs for gasoline and diesel would be $595,000. In October 2005, Appleton Mayor, Tim Hanna, projected actual costs to be $936,000.
The rise in the cost of fuel in the past year forced the city of Charleston, SC to spend $150,000 more than planned just to keep its public vehicles running.
In Winnebago County, Wisconsin, County Executive Mark Harris recently noted the need for more than 100 layoffs, threatening positions once thought indispensable. The county's combined cost for all types of fuel, budgeted at an estimated $1.6 million in 2005, is predicted to rise to nearly $2.2 million in 2006, according to Harris.
Back on August 26, 2005, the Deseret Morning News reported that Arizona was bracing for the financial impact from gas prices. "Already," Deseret reported, "state officials are looking at boosting the state budget next year by nearly $685,000 to make up for the increase in gas costs."
According to the Arizona Republic on October 6, 2005, the Arizona Department of Public Safety will cut the number of miles police will patrol on the highway due to skyrocketing gas prices that could cost the agency an extra $2 million in 2006.
"Officers have been ordered to cut their driving by 10 percent a month and conduct stationary enforcements using radar guns on freeway ramps, medians or overpasses instead of patrolling," the Republic said.
In Calumet County, Wisconsin, finance director, Dan De Bonis, informed county supervisors that motor fuel will cost the county about $91,000 more in 2006, a 62% hike, and that heating costs will increase as much as 44%.
The Bush administration has failed to take any action to deal with the crisis. Every day, American workers, consumers, and small businesses suffer with no solutions in sight. The response from the White House has been to claim that Americans are addicted to oil.
The tax breaks, if any, that average families received under Bush's tax cut program, have long ago been siphoned away at the pump. Yet, while traveling in California last weekend, Bush warned of even higher prices with vacation time approaching.
In a feeble attempt to appease the public this week, Bush said he will temporarily divert oil used to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve into the market to drive prices down.
Apparently acknowledging the act as a do-nothing remedy, Bush made the comment, "Every little bit counts."
I doubt that many people appreciated a snide remark like this coming from a guy who has never had to balance a checkbook, never had to worry about paying a heating bill or filling up the gas tank, but who now through some perverse twist of fate, maintains a stranglehold on the nation's purse strings.
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Airlines again hike ticket prices blaming fuel costs
AFP
April 26, 2006
PARIS - Air France-KLM, Singapore Airlines and a string of other carriers are increasing the fuel surcharge element in their long-haul ticket prices, again passing on to passengers the rising cost of aviation fuel.
The airlines justify the price hikes by the recent surge in crude prices, sparked by fears that the international crisis over Tehran's nuclear programme could trigger disruptions in supplies from Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer.
The price of crude hit an all-time high of over US $75 a barrel on April 21. In early afternoon trading in New York on Wednesday it was changing hands at US $72.15 a barrel.
Singapore Airlines announced on Wednesday it was slapping an extra US $10 dollars (EUR 8) onto the price of certain long-haul flights.
Air France will on Saturday raise its fuel surcharge by EUR 7 (US $8.70) - the sixth increase since the carrier introduced a fuel supplement in May 2004.
That puts Air France's fuel surcharge up to EUR 51 per one-way long-haul flight, from EUR 44. And since most travellers buy return tickets, the result is a surcharge of EUR 102 per round trip.
Dutch carrier KLM, which was bought by Air France in 2004, upped its fuel surcharge by EUR 5 (US $6.2) to EUR 45 earlier this month.
Five other European airlines introduced similar increases during April - British Airways, German carrier Lufthansa and its subsidiary Swiss, TAP Portugal and Spanish carrier Iberia.
The rise and rise of crude oil prices is an unwelcome development for airlines, some of whom now say fuel has become the most expensive item on their budgets.
Last year their overall fuel bill rose 50 percent to US $92 billion and this year it could be higher still. As a result, the industry made a loss of US$6 billion in 2005 despite a strong increase in air traffic, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Despite colossal efforts to slash costs, the industry is expected to make a loss of US $2.2 billion this year and only return to profit in 2007, the IATA says.
In the meantime, sky-high crude prices are continuing to play havoc.
US low-cost airline JetBlue Airways announced on Tuesday it was delaying the delivery of 12 A320 planes and hoped to sell off another five, after plunging into the red in the first quarter of 2006.
Other airlines are managing for the moment to limit the damage by resorting to "fuel hedging", or buying their kerosene in advance so as to soften the fluctuations in price.
For example Air France-KLM, whose fuel bill is forecast at EUR 3.5 billion for the 2005-06 fiscal year, is covered for 84 percent of its fuel needs for the period, at a cost of US $39 a barrel.
But the group is steeling itself for difficult times ahead - its coverage is set to dip to 62 percent in 2006-07 and sink to just 34 percent in 2007-08.
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Voodoo Economics
America's rags-to-riches dream an illusion: study
By Alister Bull
Reuters
Wed Apr 26, 2006
WASHINGTON - America may still think of itself as the land of opportunity, but the chances of living a rags-to-riches life are a lot lower than elsewhere in the world, according to a new study published on Wednesday.
The likelihood that a child born into a poor family will make it into the top five percent is just one percent, according to "Understanding Mobility in America," a study by economist Tom Hertz from American University.
By contrast, a child born rich had a 22 percent chance of being rich as an adult, he said.
"In other words, the chances of getting rich are about 20 times higher if you are born rich than if you are born in a low-income family," he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank sponsoring the work.
He also found the United States had one of the lowest levels of inter-generational mobility in the wealthy world, on a par with Britain but way behind most of Europe.
"Consider a rich and poor family in the United States and a similar pair of families in Denmark, and ask how much of the difference in the parents' incomes would be transmitted, on average, to their grandchildren," Hertz said.
"In the United States this would be 22 percent; in Denmark it would be two percent," he said.
The research was based on a panel of over 4,000 children, whose parents' income were observed in 1968, and whose income as adults was reviewed again in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1999.
The survey did not include immigrants, who were not captured in the original data pool. Millions of immigrants work in the U.S, many illegally, earning much higher salaries than they could get back home.
Several other experts invited to review his work endorsed the general findings, although they were reticent about accompanying policy recommendations.
"This debunks the myth of America as the land of opportunity, but it doesn't tell us what to do to fix it," said Bhashkar Mazumder, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland who has researched this field.
Recent studies have highlighted growing income inequality in the United States, but Americans remain highly optimistic about the odds for economic improvement in their own lifetime.
A survey for the New York Times last year found that 80 percent of those polled believed that it was possible to start out poor, work hard and become rich, compared with less than 60 percent back in 1983.
This contradiction, implying that while people think they are going to make it, the reality is very different, has been seized by critics of President Bush to pound the White House over tax cuts they say favor the rich.
Hertz examined channels transmitting income across generations and identified education as the single largest factor, explaining 30 percent of the income-correlation, in an argument to boost public access to universities.
Breaking the survey down by race spotlighted this as the next most powerful force to explain why the poor stay poor.
On average, 47 percent of poor families remain poor. But within this, 32 percent of whites stay poor while the figure for blacks is 63 percent.
It works the other way as well, with only 3 percent of blacks making it from the bottom quarter of the income ladder to the top quarter, versus 14 percent of whites.
"Part of the reason mobility is so low in America is that race still makes a difference in economic life," he said.
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US economy grows 4.8% in first quarter
By Christopher Swann in Washington
FT.com
April 28 2006
The US economy grew at a 4.8 per cent annualised rate at the start of the year, spurred by a swift rebound in consumer spending.
The outcome was in line with expectations with most economists forecasting a revival after a growth rate of just 1.7 per cent in the forth quarter of last year.
Over the past year real national output has risen by 3.5 per cent.
Consumer spending rose by 5.5 per cent in the first quarter, following a rise of just 0.9 per cent in the previous three months.
Fixed non residential investment rose by 14.3 per cent, up from 4.5 per cent - pointing to continuing strength in business inestment.
The figures add to recent evidence that US industry remains in rude good health.
Import growth continued to outpace exports, with a rise of 13 percent compared to 12.1 for exports.
The price deflator - a broad measure of inflation - was up 3.3 per cent, slightly slower than at the end of 2005.
Ian Shepherdson, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics, siad final demand overall was solid, but he predicted that growth in the second quarter would be substantially slower.
"Q2 will be much weaker. We expect growth to slow to 3 per cent or less, led by a sharp slowing in consumption," he said.
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis said personal spending increased 5.5 per cent in the first quarter, compared with an increase of 0.9 per cent in the fourth. Durables goods purchases jumped 20.6 percent, in contrast with a fall 16.6 percent in the previous quarter.
Final sales of computers contributed 0.11 percentage point to the first-quarter growth in real GDP after contributing 0.33 percentage point to the fourth-quarter growth. It said motor vehicle output subtracted 0.23 percentage point from the first-quarter growth in real GDP after subtracting 0.64 percentage point from the fourth-quarter growth.
Economic analsyts had been expected growth of about 4.9 per cent, up from earlier expectations after signs of a robust three months for the economy.
More recently, durable goods orders this week showed a surge of 6.1 per cent in March, more than three times faster than analysts had been expecting and suggesting that US industry remains in strong shape.
On Thursday, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, indicated that the economy had continued to grow at a solid pace, saying there had been generally strong economic data since the Fed's last policy meeting in March.
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New home sales soar in March, but price weaknesses shown
By Chris Isidore
CNNMoney.com
April 27, 2006
NEW YORK - New home sales posted the biggest jump in 13 years in March, but sales got a boost as builders cut prices to cope with higher mortgage rates and a growing backlog of houses on the market.
The government reported new homes sold at an annual rate of 1.21 million homes in March, up 13.8 percent from a revised 1.07 million pace in February. That easily topped forecasts for a 1.1 million pace from economists surveyed by Briefing.com.
The jump, the biggest since a 16 percent rise in April 1993, came even as mortgage rates hit an average 6.32 percent last month for 30-year fixed-rate loans, according to Freddie Mac, up from 6.25 percent in February.
The mortgage rate was the second-highest for any month since 2002. Rates have risen further since, climbing to 6.53 percent in the most recent weekly survey.
With rising mortgage rates driving up the cost of financing home purchases, most economists have been looking for the real estate market to cool off in 2006 after several years of record sales.
But economist Bob Brusca of FAO Economics said last month's drop in new home prices is a sign that the market for new homes isn't nearly as strong as the jump in sales would suggest.
He noted that the report showed an unusual drop in prices from both February and a year earlier, which could be a sign that home builders are cutting prices to move a large supply of new homes now on the market.
"New homes sales sprang back to life like a zombie in a cheap horror flick," Brusca said. "And like that zombie, housing really is dead. Don't let all that twitching fool you."
He said that many of the new homes sold in March were probably built in a stronger real estate market.
And unlike existing homes, where sellers can live until they get an acceptable price, "builders can't live in these houses unless they have a lot of family," he said. "By and large they must finance them at rising interest costs."
In fact, about one builder in five has reported a jump in cancellations of new home orders, according to a recent industry survey. And Wednesday's report showed that there were 553,000 new homes for sale in March, up 25 percent from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, average prices fell 7.1 percent from February to $279,100, after topping $300,000 for the first time in the February revised figures. The median price, which reflects the point at which half the homes sell for more and half sell for less, also fell 6.5 percent to $224,200.
And while month-to-month declines in home prices are not unusual, more significantly, prices also fell from a year earlier: a 2.2 percent decline in median prices and a 3.6 percent fall in average prices over that time.
Still, Wednesday's big jump in sales came after existing home sales also showed an unexpected increase last month in a report from the National Association of Realtors Tuesday.
New home sales, while a fraction of the overall real estate market, are more closely watched since they're more of a leading indicator of conditions in the housing market.
Existing home sales are recorded at closing, typically a month or two after a purchase agreement, while new home sales are tracked based on when contracts are signed.
Comment: Strangely enough, the original title of this article was "New home sales soar". Sounds pretty encouraging, doesn't it? Well, read the rest of the article for the small print...
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Dollar continues slide after Bernanke testimony
By Peter Garnham
The Financial Times
April 28 2006
The dollar slipped to a fresh seven-month low against the euro on Friday as traders continued to digest Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's testimony to US Congress.
By mid-morning, the dollar fell 0.1 per cent against the euro to $1.2544, slipped 0.3 per cent against the Swiss franc to SFr.2561 and eased 0.1 per cent against sterling to $1.8035.
Analysts at Calyon said Mr Bernanke effectively indicated that the Fed was close to a pause in its tightening cycle, with May likely to be the last interest-rate rise in the current cycle. "The big addition to the rhetoric was the statement: 'at some point in the future the committee may decide to take no action at one or more meetings'," analysts said. "This will be sufficient for markets to believe that a peak is very close."
The fact that Mr Bernanke called the widening US current account deficit "a challenge" also emboldened the dollar bears.
However Paul Chertkow at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi said concern over funding of the US current account was premature. "Even if the Fed raises the federal funds rate only one additional quarter point, the US yield curve is likely to remain much more attractive to foreign investors than the eurozone or Japanese yield curves this year," he said.
Against the yen, the dollar recovered some ground, rising 0.1 per cent to Y114.33 after hitting a three-month low on Thursday.
The yen also fell against the euro, slipping 0.3 per cent to Y143.43, as the Bank of Japan decided to keep interest rates on hold, despite data which showed that Japanese core annual inflation remained positive for the fifth consecutive month.
Speaking after the decision, Bank of Japan governor Toshiko Fukui said the central bank would not rush into raising rates, and that judging the right time to make a move would be difficult. "We see difficult times ahead but we're not in a great hurry, at the same time we are not too relaxed," he said.
Analysts at UBS said they believed the BoJ looked increasingly likely to raise rates from the third quarter of 2006. "We think the macroeconomic case for a stronger yen remains," they said. "We continue to target dollar/yen at Y108 over three months."
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Intel sees PC market slowing
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
FT.com
April 27 2006
Intel on Thursday forecast slowing growth for the personal computer industry this year and reported that several million of its microprocessors had piled up with its customers over the past two quarters.
In an admission that Intel's execution was as much a problem as industry conditions, Paul Otellini, chief executive, told an analysts meeting in New York that work was under way to "restructure, re-purpose and resize" the company to set its course for the next few years.
Mr Otellini had announced a "wholesale look" at the world's biggest chipmaker at its quarterly results presentation last week, when Intel announced profits had fallen by a third. He gave analysts more detail, saying "no stone will be left unturned ... we will see a leaner, more agile and more efficient Intel Corporation after the end of this project".
Mr Otellini said it would be too simplistic to cut its 100,000-strong global workforce. There would be a deep analysis over 90 days that would tackle non-performing businesses, market conditions and employee productivity.
"You have the full commitment of the management team to make Intel a different type of company, a more nimble company," he said.
The review will be the biggest since the company was transformed in the mid-1980s from a memory chip company to one focused on microprocessors. Intel is promising a $1bn reduction in costs this year and a $300m cut in capital spending.
Intel expects sales to fall 3 per cent in 2006 after three years of double-digit growth and at a time when the rest of the industry is performing strongly. Its stock has fallen more than 20 per cent so far this year to become the worst performer on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Intel shares were up 2 per cent to $19.87 in midday trading following Mr Otellini's comments.
The company holds more than 80 per cent of the market for the dominant "x86" family of PC microprocessors but has lost share to Advanced Micro Devices in recent quarters. Thus far, it has also failed to penetrate significantly the high-growth market for mobile phone chips, led by Texas Instruments.
Mr Otellini said Intel saw PC growth being in the single digits in 2006 - lower than analysts are currently predicting and after three years of double-digit growth for the industry. Its customers had a backlog of several million of its microprocessors in their inventories, but he expected this to be burnt off by the second half.
Intel expects to stage a comeback in the second half with three new processors, codenamed Woodcrest, Conroe and Merom for servers, desktops and notebook PCs and released in June, July and August respectively. They feature two cores or "brains" inside Intel's first new microarchitecture in five years.
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Eurozone inflationary pressures rise
By Jamie Chisholm, Economics Reporter
The Financial Times
April 28 2006
The odds on the European Central Bank hiking the cost of borrowing in June shortened considerably on Friday after a slew of data suggested inflationary pressures were building in the eurozone.
Eurostat, the European Union statistics office, said prices across the region rose by 2.4 per cent on an annual basis in April, a faster pace than the 2.2 per cent recorded in March. Analysts had forecast no change on the previous month and the stronger than expected reading gave the euro a boost.
In addition, money supply data, a number closely watched by the ECB, showed a marked acceleration in annual growth, with the M3 measure increasing by 8.6 per cent in March against 7.9 per cent in February.
Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB president, has indicated that it is unlikely the central bank will raise interest rates at its May meeting, but with inflation rising so sharply above his target of 2 per cent, and with more cash sloshing around the system than expected, it is now more probable he will tighten monetary policy in June.
A survey of business optimism only added to expectations of a move by the ECB. The European Commission said its eurozone economic sentiment indicator hit a five year high of 105.3 in April, up from 103.6 in March. The business climate indicator, meanwhile, hit its highest level since December 2000, boosted by hopes for a continued upturn in industrial production.
Households are also more bullish, said the Commission, with the consumer confidence indicator rising 1 point to minus 10.
But the improvement was not uniform. The German Federal Statistics Office said retail sales in the country fell by 2.7 per cent in March, while Insee said French consumer confidence declined in April following protests against the governments employment laws.
Howard Archer at Global Insight agreed with the market's assessment that Mr Trichet would tighten monetary policy in June, but dismissed calls from some quarters for the hike to be 0.5 percentage points rather than the more likely 0.25.
"With eurozone sentiment and economic activity likely to be increasingly pressurized by a stronger euro and high oil prices, the ECB needs to be wary about stifling growth through raising interest too aggressively over the coming months," said Mr Archer.
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The Big Blue Marble
NASA Employs Hubble To Reassure About Comet 73P
SPX
Apr 27, 2006
Pasadena CA - NASA said Thursday there is no danger that Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 - or any of its many fragments - will strike Earth during its closest approach next month. To provide further reassurances, the agency has employed the Hubble Space Telescope to take high-resolution images of the approaching object, and will soon follow suit with Spitzer to observe the fragments in infrared light.
"We are very well acquainted with the trajectory of Comet 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann 3," said Don Yeomans, manager of the agency's Near-Earth Object Program, at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "There is absolutely no danger to people on the ground or the inhabitants of the International Space Station, as the main body of the object and any pieces from the breakup will pass many millions of miles beyond the Earth."
Yeomans' pointed statement about 73P is apparently in response to vague reports on the World Wide Web that a piece of the comet will hit Earth during the flyby. Although the number of fragments has risen to nearly four dozen, he said none of them poses an impact hazard.
None of the comet's fragments will come closer than 5.5 million miles to Earth during its closest approaches between May 12 and 28 - or more than 20 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
The main fragment, C, will pass closest to Earth on May 12 at a distance of approximately 7.3 million miles. It will be visible to small telescopes during the morning hours in the constellation Vulpecula, or the Coathanger.
73P is no stranger to astronomers, who have been observing the comet for more than 75 years. They have computed its trajectory repeatedly and have refined the level of precision over time - so 73P's orbit is well known. The real news is that Hubble's images show many more fragments than had been reported by ground-based observers.
The comet is currently comprised of a chain of more than 40 fragments, named alphabetically and stretching across several degrees on the sky. Observers have noted some dramatic brightenings among some of the fragments, which suggests they are continuing to disintegrate - some could disappear altogether.
Hubble caught two of the fragments, B and G, shortly after large outbursts in activity. Hubble also photographed fragment C, which at the time was less active. The resulting images reveal that some sort of destructive process is taking place, in which fragments are continuing to split into smaller chunks.
Hubble has found several dozen house-sized fragments trailing each main fragment. Sequential images of the B fragment, for example, taken a few days apart, suggest the chunks are pushed down the tail by outgassing from the icy, sunward-facing surfaces of the chunks, much like space-walking astronauts are propelled by their jetpacks.
The smaller chunks have the lowest mass, so they are being accelerated away from the parent nucleus faster than the larger chunks. Some of the chunks seem to dissipate completely over the course of several days.
Ancient relics of the early solar system, comet nuclei are porous and fragile mixes of dust and ice. They can break apart from tidal forces when they pass near large bodies, which is what happened to Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when Jupiter's gravity tore it to pieces in 1992.
Shoemaker-Levy's fragments all plunged directly into Jupiter's atmosphere two years later, creating gaping holes in gas giant's cloudtops and leaving ugly blackened scars that lasted a year.
Comet nuclei also can fly apart from rapid rotation. Or, they can break up from the thermal stresses as they pass near the Sun, or explosively pop apart like corks from champagne bottles due to the outburst of trapped volatile gases.
"Catastrophic breakups may be the ultimate fate of most comets," said Hal Weaver, a planetary astronomer with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the team that made the recent Hubble observations.
The comet is named for German astronomers Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Arthur Wachmann, who discovered it during a photographic search for asteroids in 1930. At the time, 73P passed within 5.8 million miles of Earth, or 24 times the Earth-Moon distance. The comet orbits the Sun every 5.4 years, but it was not seen again until 1979. The comet was missed again in 1985 but has been observed during every return since.
During the fall of 1995, astronomers witnessed a huge outburst from 73P, and shortly afterwards they identified and labeled four separate nuclei as fragments A, B, C and D, with C being the largest and the presumed principal remnant of the original nucleus.
Only C and B were definitively observed during the next return in 2000-2001, possibly because of poor geometry involving Earth's location versus the cometary fragments. This year's better observing circumstances may have aided the detection of all of the new fragments, but it also is possible the disintegration of the comet is now accelerating.
Comment: None of this hoopla has happened before when a comet when sailing by the planet. NASA just stated it wasn't a threat, and that was that. If they are so confident that none of the 73P fragments will hit, why are they scrambling all their resources this time "to provide further reassurances"??
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20th Century The Wettest In Pakistan For 1,000 Years
27/04/2006
Science Daily
Since the beginning of industrialisation the amount of precipitation in Pakistan has increased considerably. This is shown by what is the first evaluation worldwide of isotopes in the annual rings of juniper trees which are more than 1,000 years old. In the currrent issue of the journal Nature, scientists from the Swiss Research Institute WSL, the Potsdam Geo Research Centre, the Jülich Research Centre and the University of Bonn report that these show that the 20th century was the wettest century in the past millennium in northern Pakistan. The reason could be global warming: when the temperature rises, the atmosphere can store more humidity, which in turn results in more snow and rain falling. The increase in precipitation is unprecedented, at least for the last 1,000 years. The researchers therefore conclude that human influence is not unlikely.
Annual rings are sensitive indicators of the climatic and environmental conditions in which they grow. "If trees become stressed -- for example in particularly dry years -- their trunk growth is less than in good times," Professor Matthias Winiger, of Bonn's Geographical Institute, says. "The annual rings then tend to be correspondingly close together." The analysis of the oxygen absorbed by the wood is even more revealing. For this the ratio of two varieties of oxygen which differ in weight, what are known as isotopes, is measured. "This method is extremely complex, but permits very exact statements to be made about the humidity conditions in the year in question," Professor Winiger explains.
The team of scientists examined four stocks of trees in the Karakorum Mountains and the Himalayas. Juniper trees can live to a ripe old age. In one of the stocks of trees the annual rings could be followed back to 828 A.D. Their wood is thus a very reliable 'climate archive' going back more than 1,000 years. In order to estimate the accuracy of the data, the researchers compared the precipitation graphs based on the annual rings over a reference period with observation data from meteorological stations. However, these have only been available in the mountains of Pakistan since 1898. "For this period of time our method tallies remarkably well with the meteorological data," Professor Winiger emphasises.
The results show that there must have been particularly wet periods in the past, too, e.g. around 1200 or 1350. However, in the late 19th and the whole of the 20th centuries such 'precipitation peaks' were both especially high and remarkably frequent. The development of precipitation in Pakistan thereby shows parallels with the global rise in temperature which has been observable over the past 150 years. Among other effects it influences atmospheric processes, particularly what is known as the atmospheric circulation. By this scientists mean the global air currents which are primarily driven by the warmth irradiated by the sun.
It is presumed that climate change can at least in part be traced back to the green-house gases such as carbon dioxide and steam, which are produced directly or indirectly by human beings. The authors of the study reveal that they are themselves concerned about their findings: they write that "in these sub-tropical and peripheral tropical regions changes in the precipitation rate and distribution and thus in the water balance would have a much greater impact on people's well-being and changes in the eco-systems than the change in temperature on its own."
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Moderate quake hits eastern Taiwan
Reuters
April 28, 2006
TAIPEI - An earthquake measuring 5.6 rattled eastern Taiwan on Friday, shaking office buildings in the capital, officials said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The epicentre of the moderate quake, which struck at 5.05 p.m. was about 4.4 miles northeast of Hualien on the eastern coast, at a depth of 3.7 miles, the Central Weather Bureau said in a statement.
Earthquakes occur frequently in Taiwan, which lies on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.
One of Taiwan's worst-recorded quakes occurred in September 1999. Measuring 7.6, it killed more than 2,400 people and destroyed or damaged 50,000 buildings.
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Dead Starfish Are Discovered in B.C.
AP
Thu Apr 27, 2006
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Hundreds of starfish have been found dead on a beach on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, and a scientist says a nonnative parasite is likely to blame.
Purple sea stars began washing up last week in Trail Bay at Sechelt, north of Vancouver. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been unable to determine why they died, agency spokeswoman Michelle Imbeau said.
Bruce Leighton, a marine parasite expert at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, noted Wednesday that the die-off coincided with the peak of the starfish reproductive cycle, when the creatures are most vulnerable to Orchitophrya stellarum, a protozoan that feeds on sea stars' sperm.
He said the parasite is believed responsible for wiping out purple sea stars in North Vancouver's Indian Arm and eliminating much of the male population of the species in other areas of British Columbia, altering the balance of species.
The parasite is native to the Atlantic but is now found along the British Columbia and Washington state coast, possibly after arriving in ship ballast water or with seafood. East Coast starfish usually survive infestations, scientists said.
Sea stars feed on mussels and barnacles, making more room in the intertidal zone for other creatures that support other marine and bird life and thus helping to maintain biodiversity, Leighton said.
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Soaring Pollen Counts Spur Worst Allergy Season in Years
By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
April 27, 2006
April showers bring May flowers, but this year they've also brought a bumper crop of grass, ragweed and early-budding trees that means misery to millions of allergic Americans.
Experts across the country say they are recording the highest pollen counts they've seen in a decade. And while the Southeast usually gets slammed the hardest when it comes to airborne allergens, this season it may be Yankees who are suffering the most.
"I looked at the total pollen counts for this season compared to last, and, at this point, we have already reached 80-90 percent of what we saw for the entire season last year," said Albany, N.Y.-based allergy specialist Dr. David Shulan, a spokesman for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI).
The culprit: a mild, wet winter and early spring, plus unusually warm days.
"We have seen an early and aggressive allergy season, including seasonal pollens and mold spores," said Dr. Clifford Bassett, a Long Island-based allergist and vice-chairman of AAAAI's Public Education Committee.
Shulan agreed. "The buds have been ready to burst, and when we have these warm days, the pollen counts have been just wild," he said.
According to the Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America, which estimates that 50 million Americans are impacted by allergies, the top 10 worst cities to be in right now, in terms of airborne allergens, are:* Hartford, Conn.
* Greenville, S.C.
* Boston
* Detroit
* Orlando, Fla.
* Knoxville, Tenn.
* Omaha, Neb.
* Sacramento, Calif.
* Washington, D.C.
* Baltimore
There are steps the allergic can take to minimize the sneezing, wheezing and itchy eyes that plague them this season. One is obvious: Avoid the great outdoors. That doesn't mean sealing yourself indoors 24/7, experts said, but some common-sense tips might help.
"First off, get someone else to help you with yard chores -- find someone in the family who's not allergic to do the mowing, for example," said Dr. Sandra McMahan, a senior staff physician specializing in pediatric allergy at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas.
Pollen counts are always highest in the morning, so try and plan outdoor activities for the afternoon or evening whenever possible. Rain tends to drive allergens out of the air, so planning activities for just after a good rain makes sense, too. "The patient will frequently feel better for a day or so after a rainstorm, because there's less pollen blowing around," said McMahan, who is also an assistant professor of internal medicine at the Texas A & M Health Science Center College of Medicine.
All the experts stressed that keeping windows closed and using air conditioning -- even when the weather is pleasant outside -- can cut the misery for allergic individuals while they're at home.
But what about that perennial springtime passion, gardening? Bassett said green-thumbed Americans can still enjoy their hobby, despite allergies, as long as they follow a few simple steps.
First off, he said, wear gloves and a pollen mask while outside, and work on relatively humid, windless days. Keep soils moist and gardens free of flowering weeds. Shower and shampoo after you come back inside. Rinse off glasses after gardening and keep gardening clothing away from the bedroom.
Bassett also advised against planting the following high-allergen species: amaranthus, crocus, elderberry, juniper, peony, poppy and privet. Some low-allergen alternatives include azalea, begonia, bougainvillea, daisy, dahlia, gladiola, iris, irish moss, marigold, orchids, snapdragon, sunflowers, tulips, violets and zinnias.
And don't forget the secret sex lives of plants: "Planting female trees in one's own yard will attract and then trap incoming airborne pollen from male plants," Bassett warned.
The experts also advised that people back up all of these tips with medication.
"Medications are much better now than they were in the past," McMahan said. "We have the nonsedating antihistamines, which are very helpful and much safer to use. One -- loratadine, generic Claritin -- is now available over-the-counter." There's also an antihistamine nasal spray, Astelin, available by prescription, he added
Besides these, there are what Shulan called the "heavy hitters" -- nasal steroids such as Flonase (now available in a cheaper generic form) as well as Rhinocort, Nasacort and Nasonex.
"Remember though, these drugs take time to start working -- it make take up to two weeks for them to take full effect, although you'll notice some relief in a day or two," Shulan said. "With the nasal steroids, you have to use them regularly throughout the season," he added
So, with proper planning and the right pharmaceuticals, most Americans should be able to cope with even this year's tough allergy season.
But they may have to be patient.
"Here in Albany, the trees start acting up from late March going into June, then the grass takes over in late May, peaking in June and early July," Shulan said. "That should go right through summer till it tapers off sometime in September."
More information
For much more on seasonal allergies, head to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
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Bird flu reaches Chinese girl, others prepare culls
By Jerker Hellstrom
Reuters
Thu Apr 27, 2006
SHANGHAI - China announced the spread of H5N1 avian flu to an eight-year-old girl on Thursday, its second human case this month coming a day after a top WHO official warned the world not to tire of fighting the virus.
Bird flu's spread has led to the death and culling of 200 million birds since late 2003, with scientists fearing the avian disease could mutate to a form easily passed among people.
Britain and Ivory Coast prepared to start more poultry slaughtering after discovering viral outbreaks, although Britain said the virus it had detected at a chicken farm was probably not the H5N1 strain dangerous to humans.
China's official Xinhua news agency cited the country's health minister as saying the infected girl, from the southeast Sichuan province, was being treated in a local hospital.
Confirming the news, the World Health Organization said in a statement the girl's diagnosis brought China's laboratory-confirmed cases to 18, 12 of which had been fatal.
"She developed symptoms of fever and pneumonia on April 16. She remains hospitalized," the WHO said.
Just over a week ago on April 18, China's Health Ministry announced the country's 17th confirmed human H5N1 case, that of a migrant worker who died a day later.
Epidemiologists fear that if the virus mutates into a form easily passed between humans it might trigger a pandemic in which millions could die.
Experts generally agree that a pandemic of some kind is overdue, and that H5N1 presents the most likely threat.
So far, however, it remains essentially an animal disease.
205 people have been infected in nine countries, causing 113 deaths, since bird flu re-emerged in Asia in 2003, according to the WHO, a
United Nations agency. In the same time the disease has spread among birds in 45 countries.
BIRD FLU FATIGUE?
In an interview published on Wednesday the acting director of WHO's global influenza program had warned the world it needed to prepare for a long-term fight against bird flu and not give in to fatigue that seemed to have set in.
Keiji Fukuda said the virus's tenacity and persistence increased the risk that it might evolve into a pandemic.
Britain and Ivory Coast looked to be keeping up measures to stop the disease's spread.
The United Kingdom is to cull some 35,000 birds on a poultry farm in the east of the country after a strain of bird flu was detected in chickens.
Preliminary tests showed the virus was likely to be an H7 strain of bird flu, not H5N1, the government's chief vet said.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said all birds on the farm near Norwich, an area home to some of Europe's biggest poultry farms, would be killed as soon as possible as a precautionary measure.
Ivory Coast also prepared to slaughter chickens and tightened restrictions on poultry movement after reporting outbreaks in two populous parts of its main city Abidjan.
The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said late on Wednesday birds infected with H5N1 had been found in separate outbreaks in the Marcory Anoumabo and Treichville suburbs.
Two local clinics had made the diagnosis, which the OIE expected to be confirmed by its own laboratory in Padua, Italy.
"We are going to start killing all poultry in a 3 km (2 mile) radius around the site that has been declared positive," said Bakary Cisse, head of the government's animal disease surveillance task force.
Myanmar appeared to have scored a success with its program of culling and restrictions in recent weeks though, with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization agreeing with a decision to lift a ban on the sale and movement of poultry within days.
FAO chief technical adviser Ram Chaudhary said the tough restrictions were no longer necessary because no new outbreaks had been reported for 3 weeks.
"Myanmar was very strict. They had closed down the poultry markets. Nobody could prepare or sell chicken on the street."
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Trouble in Bushland?
Top Bush aide Rove appears again before grand jury
AFP
Wed Apr 26, 2006
WASHINGTON - Top White House adviser Karl Rove testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of a
CIA officer's identity, in his fifth appearance before the panel, his lawyer said.
Rove "testified voluntarily and unconditionally at the request of the Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to explore a matter raised since Mr Rove's last appearance in October 2005," Robert Luskin said in a statement.
"In connection with this appearance, the special counsel has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges," Luskin said.
The federal probe centers on identifying who within
President George W. Bush's administration leaked to the media the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, in what critics have alleged was an act of retribution against her husband, Joseph Wilson.
Wilson fell out of favor with the administration after publicly challenging in July 2003 administration assertions that Iraq had been attempting to procure radioactive material from Niger to build a nuclear weapon.
Another senior White House aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, faces charges in the inquiry.
Libby, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, is scheduled to go on trial next January.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to answer any questions related to Rove and the grand jury on Wednesday.
A spokesman for Fitzgerald did the same. "I cannot comment on any witnesses who may or may not be appearing before a grand jury or any activity before a grand jury," Randall Sanborn said.
Bush last week reassigned Rove as part of a shake-up of his top advisers, freeing up his political guru from duties overseeing domestic policy to allow him to work on crafting a winning Republican strategy for November's mid-term elections.
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, in a statement, said that the reports of Rove's reappearance before the panel were "ominous".
"While obviously no one knows what goes on in the grand jury, the fact that Karl Rove has been called back once again, is ominous.
"This additional Rove visit clearly shows that the Plame investigation is far from over, and that Patrick Fitzgerald is living up to his reputation as an impartial, dedicated prosecutor determined to turn over every stone," Schumer said.
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Judge Won't Dismiss Case Against Libby
By TONI LOCY
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - A federal judge refused Thursday to dismiss charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former top White House aide who was indicted on perjury and obstruction charges last year in the CIA leak scandal.
In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton turned down a motion by lawyers for Vice President
Dick Cheney's one-time top assistant, who challenged the authority of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to handle the case.
Libby's lawyers had argued that Fitzgerald was given too much power - more than the attorney general - and that the appointment should have been made by the president with the Senate's approval.
Walton said Thursday he did not need to "look far" in the law to reject the claim by Libby's defense team. The judge said there is no question the attorney general can delegate any of his functions.
"There was no wholesale abdication of the attorney general's duty to direct and supervise litigation," he wrote.
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had recused himself from the investigation because of his White House contacts. James Comey, who was deputy attorney general at the time, appointed Fitzgerald, giving him wide berth to conduct the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters in 2003.
"This case provides the clearest example of why such broad discretion is necessary," Walton wrote. "Here, the attorney general believed there was a conflict of interest ... It was, therefore, entirely appropriate for the attorney general to remove himself completely from the investigation."
Walton said there must be a way to appoint special prosecutors to ensure that "the perception of fairness withstands the scrutiny of the American public" when high-level government officials are investigated for alleged wrongdoing.
Libby, 55, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about Plame and what he subsequently told reporters about her.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak named her in a column July 14, 2003, eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.
The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Walton said Comey made the legal analysis more difficult by failing to appoint Fitzgerald under Justice Department rules for special prosecutors. As a result, the judge said he had to rely on a series of letters Comey wrote to Fitzgerald outlining the CIA leak investigation.
The judge concluded that Fitzgerald's powers are limited because he can be removed by the Justice Department. Walton also said Fitzgerald's authority will expire when the CIA leak investigation and resulting prosecutions are concluded.
"The integrity of the rule of law ... is challenged to the greatest degree when high-level government officials come under suspicion for violating the law," Walton wrote. "And a criminal investigation of any individuals, prominent or not ... must be above reproach to preserve respect for the fairness of our system of justice."
Comment: If the headline of this story was "Judge Refuses to Dismiss War Crimes Case Against Entire Bush Administration", THEN we'd have something to cheer about...
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Sen. Specter Threatens to Block NSA Funds
By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - Noting that Congress holds the power of the purse, a frustrated Senate chairman threatened to try to block money for President Bush's domestic wiretapping program.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Thursday he delivered a message to Bush that cut to the heart of the debate over executive power.
"I made the point that the president doesn't have a blank check," Specter said about their meeting Wednesday. "He didn't choose to engage me on that point."
Without a pledge from Bush to provide more information on the surveillance program, Specter filed an amendment to a spending bill Thursday that amounted to a warning to the White House.
The amendment would enact a "prohibition on use of funds for domestic electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes unless Congress is kept fully and currently informed."
Specter also said he would turn the amendment into a bill and hold hearings.
"Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment," Specter said. "If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may be the only way we can do it."
Specter made clear that, for now, the threat was just that.
"I'm not prepared to call for the withholding of funds," he told reporters later.
"But I think that it is important to elevate the public consciousness as to what is going on," Specter said. "The four hearings we have had and the way the matter is drifting, in my view, is insufficient to safeguard civil liberties."
The move got the White House's attention, but not its immediate cooperation. Bush has insisted that the program falls within his authority and has refused to allow Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other officials to answer many of Specter's questions.
"The appropriate members of Congress have been and continue to be informed with respect to the Terrorist Surveillance Program," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
"The administration remains confident that a majority of members of Congress continue to recognize the importance of protecting Americans through lawful intelligence activities directed at terrorists," Perino said.
Specter said he hoped to jolt the public's awareness and "an inert Congress ... which has not stood up to the executive branch."
"You have a Congress which candidly is more concerned about re-election and fundraising and who controls the House and the Senate than about asserting constitutional prerogatives," Specter said. "That's not the way it ought to be. These are matters which require some active congressional action and that's what I'm looking toward."
For now, Specter said he will not bother having Gonzales return to the committee "because he won't tell us anything."
Threatening to withhold money from the wiretapping program is not unprecedented.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee tried to attach an amendment to the 2007 intelligence authorization bill to withhold money from the National Security Agency if the White House did not disclose information about the cost of the warrantless surveillance program.
The figure was given to a select group of members who have been briefed more fully on the NSA program, and is classified.
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NSA spying comes under legal, political attack
By Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache
CNET News.com
April 27, 2006
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's no-longer-secret surveillance program employing the National Security Agency came under a two-pronged attack this week on both political and legal fronts.
First, a key Republican senator said Thursday that he was contemplating pulling the plug on the NSA spying program by cutting funding--unless, that is, the Bush administration comes clean on how the program works and whether it complies with privacy rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
"When you're withholding funds, here you're talking about real authority," Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol. Specter said he met with Bush on Wednesday but was unable to find common ground.
Second, on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in the northern district of California set two hearing dates over the next two months for a lawsuit that seeks to prove that AT&T illegally cooperated with the NSA and violated federal wiretapping laws in doing so. One date is May 17 and the other is June 21.
At issue in the AT&T lawsuit, filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not only the company's actions (it has repeatedly declined to answer questions from CNET News.com). It's also over whether EFF will be able to unseal allegedly confidential documents it obtained, including a sworn statement by a retired AT&T telecommunications technician describing a "dragnet surveillance" scheme.
AT&T has asked the judge not only to keep the documents sealed and away from the public's eyes, but also to force the digital-rights group to return them. "We're waiting to see what happens," Lee Tien, an EFF senior staff attorney, said Thursday.
In Washington, the political situation is becoming even more complicated than the legal one. The Senate Judiciary Committee has convened four hearings this year related to the terrorist surveillance program that could be spying on an untold number of Americans' phone conversations and e-mails.
But the committee has still not obtained enough information to do its job, which is to judge the constitutionality of the program, and neither has the intelligence committee, which the administration is legally obligated to brief on such matters, Specter said.
"Is the president doing anything wrong?" Specter asked. "We don't know, because we don't know what the program is."
There's no doubt that the program is going on in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a 1978 law that requires a secret court to approve investigative wiretapping before it occurs, Specter said. What remains murky, he added, is whether the president's constitutional powers as commander-in-chief would justify the program's existence without a court order.
"Here you have a lot of taps going on in America, in violation of a statute," Specter said. "They may be necessary, they may be vital, but there needs to be a determination of that...to ensure they're not a violation of privacy without probable cause."
Specter introduced a bill in March that would explicitly require the FISA court to sign off on all future and existing surveillance programs. That measure, along with two other bills regulating electronic surveillance, remains under debate in committee.
Specter emphasized that he doesn't want the issue to fade into the background, saying that he'd like to see "public concern and public indignation build up." He said it's possible he would also propose a separate bill to withhold the funds and plans to study how such a tactic has or has not been used in other times of controversy, such as during the Vietnam War.
The tactic may be largely symbolic, though, unless other Republicans join him or Democrats manage to retake the House of Representatives in the fall 2006 elections.
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Juror Claims She Was Pressured to Convict Hamid Hayat
By DON THOMPSON
Associated Press
April 28, 2006
SACRAMENTO - A juror said in a sworn statement that she was pressured into casting the final vote to convict a man of attending a Pakistani terrorist training camp.
The juror's affidavit means Hamid Hayat, of Lodi, should get a new trial, attorney Wazhma Mojaddidi argued in a motion filed in federal court late Thursday.
"I was under so much stress and pressure (from the other jurors) that I agreed to change my vote," Arcelia Lopez of Sacramento said in her statement. "I never once throughout the deliberation process and the reading of the verdict believed Hamid Hayat to be guilty."
Prosecutors said repeatedly since Tuesday's verdict that they don't believe there was any improper influence on jurors, and that any pressure on Lopez was part of the normal jury deliberation process.
Though emotional, Lopez confirmed her guilty vote in open court Tuesday when all 12 jurors were questioned by presiding U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr.
"I deeply regret my decision," Lopez said in the affidavit obtained by defense investigator and former
FBI agent James Wedick.
Lopez said she went to a medical clinic Saturday with a migraine headache and believed "my health and physical well-being were being affected by the pressure from the other jurors to change my vote."
Prosecutors say Hayat, 23, should face a minimum 30 years in prison at his July 14 sentencing based on his convictions on charges he provided material support by attending the terror camp in 2003 and lying about it to FBI agents when he was questioned after he returned to the United States in May.
Hayat told agents in an hours-long videotaped statement that he was awaiting orders to carry out a religious war against targets such as banks, groceries and hospitals. Mojaddidi disputes the confession and says there is no direct proof Hayat attended the camp.
Hours before the guilty verdict against Hamid Hayat, a separate jury said it was hopelessly deadlocked on whether his father, Umer Hayat, 48, also of Lodi, was guilty of lying to FBI agents about his son's alleged terrorist training.
Prosecutors are expected to tell Burrell on Friday if they will retry the older man's case. Burrell has set a hearing on whether Umer Hayat should be released on bail.
Both men were detained along with two Muslim religious leaders in what authorities suggested was part of a terrorist movement in Lodi, located in a grape-growing region 35 miles south of the state capital. The two imams and one man's son were deported for immigration violations, however, and the Hayats were the only people criminally charged in the probe.
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Katrina Report Again Rips Bush Admin
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
AP
Apr 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - A Senate inquiry into the government's Hurricane Katrina failures ripped the Bush administration anew Thursday and urged the scrapping of the nation's disaster response agency. But with a new hurricane season just weeks away, senators conceded that few if any of their proposals could become reality in time.
The bipartisan investigation into one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history singled out President Bush and the White House as appearing indifferent to the devastation until two days after the storm hit.
It said the Homeland Security Department either misunderstood federal disaster plans or refused to follow them. And it said New Orleans for years had neglected to prepare for large-scale emergencies.
"The suffering that continued in the days and weeks after the storm passed did not happen in a vacuum; instead, it continued longer that it should have because of - and was in some cases exacerbated by - the failure of government at all levels to plan, prepare for and respond aggressively to the storm," concluded the report.
It was titled "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared," sober words for the future.
The Senate inquiry is the third major federal report on the government failures exposed by the Aug. 29 storm, which killed more than 1,300 people and which the Senate Budget Committee says has so far cost the federal government $103 billion.
The report follows similar inquiries by the House and White House and comes in an election year in which Democrats have pointed critically to the administration's Katrina response.
The senators concluded that only by abolishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency - which Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called a "bumbling bureaucracy" - and replacing it with a stronger authority could the government best respond to future catastrophes.
But the two lawmakers who led the inquiry, Collins and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said such an overhaul could not be completed by the June 1 start of the hurricane season.
"As a practical matter, that's just five weeks away, and it's not going to happen," Collins told reporters. "But that doesn't mean that we should continue in the long term to operate with a system that's failed, that is so clearly flawed."
Looking ahead to approaching hurricane season, Collins added: "We're clearly better prepared than last year, but are we prepared enough? No, we're not."
Underscoring the hurdles the proposals face, eliminating FEMA got a cool reception from the White House as Bush traveled to the still-ravaged Gulf Coast to view rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and Mississippi.
"My thoughts are is that we've got to make sure it functions well. We're coming into a hurricane season," he said in an interview with "NBC Nightly News."
Earlier, White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, said, "Now is not the time to look at moving organizational boxes around."
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said: "FEMA is injured. It's going to take more than surgery and a cast to mend it. To restore the nation's confidence in times of crisis, the call for help must be answered and it must be answered quickly."
Besides dumping FEMA, the report makes 85 other recommendations, from clarifying who's responsible for maintaining New Orleans levees to demanding better plans for protecting or evacuating elderly and poor victims.
The report calls for more funding for disaster planning and response, but does not specify how much or where the money would come from.
The Bush administration says it has been working to prepare for what the National Hurricane Center has predicted will be an active decade for hurricanes. It is rebuilding New Orleans levees, prodding local governments to update evacuation plans and hire emergency workers, and creating databases to order and track food and other supplies needed during disasters.
Though the new report singles out officials from New Orleans to Washington for blame - and lambastes Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in particular - it gives Bush a mixed review for his performance. It credits the president for declaring an emergency before the hurricane's landfall, but faults him for waiting until two days after it hit to return to Washington and convene top officials to coordinate the federal response.
Lieberman, in an addendum, took sharper aim at Bush, who he said appeared distracted from the disaster as it unfolded. "The president is, after all, the commander in chief - not only in terms of international crises, but in terms of catastrophes here at home," he said.
Not all the senators who participated in the seven-month inquiry agreed with its central recommendation - to create a National Preparedness and Response Authority but keep it within the oversight of Homeland Security Department to draw on the larger department's resources.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said FEMA needs to be stripped out of the larger department and restored as an independent Cabinet-level agency. "That's how it was done in the past and it worked as we hoped," said Lautenberg, a member of the Senate panel.
But Robert Latham, director of Mississippi's emergency response efforts, said lingering funding and manpower problems should be addressed before such a drastic step is taken.
"Changing the name of something doesn't fix a problem, other than maybe fixes a perception," Latham said. "Maybe FEMA has taken such a bashing that the name recognition itself will be hard to overcome."
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Media have doubts about Snow
By Kenneth T. Walsh
US News and World Report
4/26/06
Tony Snow will have some undeniable strengths as the new White House press secretary. He is articulate and TV-ready, knows the issues, and has experience in journalism. White House insiders say President Bush was particularly impressed with how often Snow, a conservative, has backed administration policies as a Fox News commentator.
But there are a few downsides.
For one thing, many mainstream journalists consider Snow a Bush partisan and doubt he can provide much new thinking to the White House. Many reporters also doubt that he will work aggressively on their behalf to provide more access to the president and to senior administration officials and to give out more information about what the government is doing.
There's also a question about whether Snow is an adept inside player. Some who remember him from his days as a speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush say that Snow was often blindsided by policy decisions no one told him about and that his advice was often ignored. He also was unable to make his way into the White House inner circle and was never a confidant of Bush the elder.
These are the same kinds of problems endured by outgoing Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who is leaving the West Wing early next month.
"The press secretary's job is not that difficult as long as you have a president who's willing to work with you," says a former adviser to Bush's father. "That hasn't been the case for Scott."
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Soldier Found Dead After Apparent Suicide
By MITCH STACY
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
TAMPA, Fla. - A 20-year-old soldier was found dead in his barracks the day after an apparent suicide note was posted on his MySpace.com Web page.
The Army has not released the cause of Pvt. Dylan Meyer's death on Tuesday at Fort Gordon, Ga.
But the last posting on the Tampa man's Web page seemed to indicate that he had planned to end his life.
MySpace.com said there is no way to determine whether Meyer wrote the message himself.
"Jesus, I don't know if any of you have heard what has happened to me yet, but I just want to remind you not to be sad," said the note, posted Monday. "Laugh, that's what lifes about ... When it is all said and done, ... it is the ones you love who you will remember."
Meyer's father referred questions Thursday to Army public affairs. Joe Walker, a spokesman for Meyer's unit, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, said the investigation is still going on.
MySpace.com - a social networking hub with more 72 million members - allows users to post searchable profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as what music they like.
Dustin Triplett, a friend of Meyer's from high school, told the St. Petersburg Times that many of Meyer's friends were surprised by his decision to join the Army early last year. Triplett said Meyer told him how much he hated the military and that he was never comfortable.
On his MySpace page, a passage addressed to other soldiers read: "Have fun you simple minded creatures. The army needs drones like you, you are what they call life long enlisted."
A film and drama fan, Meyer made a movie on April 21 that was added to his MySpace site, a short film about Army life called "Bored As Hell: A Weekend at Ft. Gordon."
MySpace.com said in a statement Thursday that a third of its staff is devoted to monitoring content, mostly for violations of its terms-of-use agreement, including posting of inappropriate photos and hate speech.
The company added that it could not comment or specific cases or ongoing investigations. But when situations arise "that put the safety and security of our more than 74 million members at risk, we work with the appropriate authorities" to quickly resolve them, the company said.
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Or Business As Usual?
Immigrant boycott aims to "close" US cities
By Dan Whitcomb
Reuters
Thu Apr 27, 2006
LOS ANGELES - Pro-immigration activists say a nationwide boycott and marches planned for May 1 will flood Americas's streets with millions of Latinos to demand amnesty for illegal immigrants and shake the ground under Congress as it tackles reform.
But while such a massive turnout could make for the largest protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s, not all Latinos, nor their leaders, were comfortable with such militancy -- fearing a backlash in Middle America.
"There will be 2 to 3 million people hitting the streets in Los Angeles alone. We're going to close down Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tucson, Phoenix, Fresno," said Jorge Rodriguez, a union official who helped organize earlier rallies credited with rattling Congress as it debates the issue.
Immigration has split Congress, the Republican Party and public opinion. Conservatives want the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to be classified as felons and a fence built along the Mexican border.
Others, including President George W. Bush, want a guest worker program and a path to citizenship. Most agree some reform is needed to stem the flow of poor to the world's biggest economy.
"We want full amnesty, full legalization for anybody who is here (illegally)," Rodriguez said. "That is the message that is going to be played out across the country on May 1."
Organizers of the May Day marches, which have strong support from big labor and the Roman Catholic church, vow that America's major cities will grind to a halt and its economy will stagger as Latinos walk off their jobs and skip school.
Teachers' unions in major cities have said children should not be punished for walking out of class. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District said school principals had been told that they should not try to keep students in class but instead should walk with the children to help keep order.
In Chicago, Catholic priests have helped organize protests, sending information to all 375 parishes in the archdiocese.
CRITICS CHARGE INTIMIDATION
Chicago activists predict that the demonstrations will draw 300,000 people -- compared to the 100,000 who turned out on March 10 to clog downtown streets. Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. said it will close seven meatpacking plants so workers can participate.
In New York, leaders of the May 1 Coalition said a growing number of businesses had pledged to close and allow their workers to attend a rally in Manhattan's Union Square.
But some Latinos have expressed ambivalence about the boycott and marches, saying they could stir up anti-immigrant sentiment amid an incendiary atmosphere surrounding the issue.
Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles archdiocese, who has emerged as an outspoken champion of immigrant rights -- even calling on priests to defy laws aimed at those who would help illegals -- has lobbied against a walkout.
"Personally I believe we can make May 1st a 'win-win' day here in Southern California," Mahony said in a statement. "Go to work, go to school, and then join thousands of us at a major rally afterward."
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the son of a Mexican immigrant who has long fought for immigrant rights, has taken a low profile on the issue. A Villaraigosa spokeswoman said the mayor expects protesters to be "lawful and respectful" and wants children to stay in school.
Critics have accused pro-immigrant leaders of stirring up uninformed young Latinos by telling them that their parents were in imminent danger of being deported and accuse them of trying to bully Congress.
"It's intimidation," Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman volunteer border patrol group, said of the May 1 events. "It's intimidation when a million people march down main streets in our major cities under the Mexican flag."
"It angers the people you are trying to impress," he said. "This will backfire just like the Mexican flag parades backfired."
Comment: Do you get the feeling that the immigration issue is just more of the same "divide and conquer" technique used so successfully by the Bush administration?
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State Senate Supports Immigrant Walkout On Monday
AP
Apr 27, 2006
SACRAMENTO - California's state senators on Thursday endorsed Monday's boycott of schools, jobs and stores by illegal immigrants and their allies as supporters equated the protest with great social movements in American history.
By a 24-13 vote that split along party lines, the California Senate approved a resolution that calls the one-day protest the Great American Boycott 2006 and describes it as an attempt to educate Americans "about the tremendous contribution immigrants make on a daily basis to our society and economy."
"It's one day ... for immigrants to tell the country peacefully, 'We matter ... (we're) not invisible,'" said Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, the resolution's chief author. She said immigrants make up a third of California's labor force and a quarter of its residents.
Opponents said the nonbinding resolution was misleading because it failed to mention a goal of the boycott was pressuring Congress to legalize millions of undocumented people.
"It is a disingenuous effort to put the government of California on record supporting open borders," said Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside.
The boycott, also called "A Day Without Immigrants," grew out of huge pro-immigrant marches across the United States in recent weeks. Organizers are urging people to stay home from school and jobs and avoid spending money on Monday to demonstrate their importance to the U.S. economy.
California's top education official appeared with school officials in several cities Thursday to urge students to stay in school on Monday.
State Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O'Connell encouraged students interested in the immigration issue to voice their opinions by participating in protest activities but only after attending their classes.
"If students need to protest, they should feel free to do so after school," O'Connell told students and reporters at San Jose High Academy. "We want students to exercise free speech, but not at the expense of their education."
Rallies are planned for Monday in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Gardena, Bell, Santa Ana, Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, Concord and other cities.
School officials in San Leandro, meanwhile, said Thursday that rising tensions over the immigration issue may have contributed to a series of brawls between Hispanic and black teenagers.
Over a dozen San Leandro High School students were taken into custody Wednesday following the fights that started on campus and spilled over into the parking lot of a nearby convenience store.
While educators theorized that the stress children of immigrants are under while the immigration debate roils may have played a role in the violence, students said that racial tensions predated recent developments.
Several senators equated the protest with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and other major events in American history.
Segregation was ended in part because of the public bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, said Romero.
Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, likened the debate over immigrant rights to the fights over slavery, women's suffrage, the internment of Japanese during World War II, and the Vietnam War.
America wouldn't have been created without illegal action, said Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Van Nuys. "They dumped a bunch of tea in Boston harbor, illegally. God bless them," he said.
But Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks, said lawmakers should not encourage lawbreakers even if they disagreed with the law.
"It is irresponsible for this body to advocate that students leave school for any reason," Cox said.
He introduced a bill that would require a special school attendance audit on Monday, so that schools would not receive state aid for any student who was truant. School funding is based on attendance levels. O'Connell said the state would not grant waivers to schools that lose funding if students were absent while out protesting.
The debate was personal and emotional for some senators.
Sen. Nell Soto, D-Pomona, recalled watching as a child as immigration police swept up brown-skinned farmworkers, "not even asking if they were legal or illegal."
Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Norwalk, described how her grandfather remained in the country illegally after overstaying a work permit during the 1940s, when he picked fruits and vegetables while American men were fighting World War II.
"This happened 60 years ago. And you know what? The story still continues," Escutia said, choking up as she described her 11-year-old son asking her about the controversy. She said the Great American Boycott should be renamed "the Great American Secret, and that is we all rely on someone who is here illegally."
Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, while citing immigrants' contributions, said the nation's goal should be assimilation: "From many people, one people, the American people. One race, the American race."
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War Whore Rice: US seals deal on military bases in Bulgaria
By Michael Winfrey
Reuters
Fri Apr 28, 2006
SOFIA - The United States signed an agreement on Friday to establish three military bases in Bulgaria as it shifts troops from old Cold War positions to smaller installations closer to the Middle East and Africa.
Under the deal, the U.S. will deploy 2,500 soldiers on short rotations to Bulgaria as it draws down tens of thousands of troops from Cold War bases in Europe and Asia.
"The agreement indeed will enhance our cooperation, allowing the shared use of Bulgarian training facilities and strengthening our ability to operate militarily," said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after a signing ceremony on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Sofia.
Bulgaria, an ex-communist country of 7.7 million, has been eager to repay Washington for supporting its 2004 NATO membership. It has backed the U.S. in Iraq despite widespread public opposition to the war.
The 10-year agreement includes the Bezmer airfield and Novo Selo shooting range, both near Bulgaria's border with Turkey, and the Graf Ignatievo airfield in central Bulgaria.
U.S. forces will also have access to a storage facility near Bulgaria's port of Bourgas. The total number of soldiers may double for short periods during rotations every six months.
The U.S. said the first troops would most likely arrive next year. Under the arrangement, Washington may launch attacks against third countries from the bases after consulting Bulgarian authorities. Both sides have said the facilities will be shared and used mainly for training.
The agreement must still be ratified by Bulgaria's parliament, in which the three-party Socialist-led coalition holds a commanding majority.
A recent opinion survey showed 60 percent of Bulgarians were against the bases which are expected to bring tens of millions of dollars in badly-needed foreign investment and create jobs.
Bulgaria's far-right opposition Attack party has been one of the loudest opponents. It mustered around 5,000 people in protests in Sofia on Thursday.
Rights groups have expressed concern over the bases following allegations the United States may have used installations in Romania, Poland and other European states as secret CIA jails.
The plan closely resembles a deal signed in December between Washington and Bulgaria's northern Black Sea neighbor Romania.
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US Wants To Transform War From Massed Armies To Guerilla Warfare
by Chet Richards
UPI
April 28, 2006
Washington - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has approved plans that designate the elite Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, as the Department of Defense's lead element for the "war on terror."
Instead of creating wars with half trillion-dollar price tags and endless streams of roadside bombings and mortar attacks, Green Berets and SEALS will slide in, grab the bad guys, and fly off into the night.
Is there any reason to doubt that we have found the key to the "Long War" on terror?
If "terror" were a military problem that could be solved with military methods, the answer would be: "no."
SOCOM is exactly what it's advertised to be: the world's most highly skilled warriors.
Becoming a Navy SEAL, to give one example, takes two and a half years of training of such intensity that only one in five who start the program complete it. If military operations were the key to eliminating threats to our well-being in the years ahead, or at least reducing them to the level of irritants, SOCOM would be the folks you would want riding point.
If military operations were the solution to groups like al-Qaida, the war on terror would have been over years ago, given that U.S. spending on defense roughly matches the rest of the world combined.
The United States is not, however, meeting military forces on the field of battle, but facing a collection of various guerrilla and anarchist groups whose motivations are primarily economic, political, social, and most of all, religious.
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, for example, survive because they can convince large numbers of people that their religion and way of life are under attack by Western nations with a Christian, Jewish, or worst of all, secular agenda.
As evidence, they cite the West's military involvement against Muslims -- as bin Laden reiterated this week -- and U.S. support of non-democratic regimes that have invited the infidels in. Paradoxically, military operations, even successful ones by SOCOM, reinforce bin Laden's message.
The problem in areas of the world that harbor such groups is the economic, political, and social structures, or lack thereof. The United States could go in and take out terrorists, assuming there was intelligence of suitable quality, but if the society does not change, it will simply spawn more.
As an aside, the requirement for quality intelligence should not be taken lightly -- consider the problems the United States and coalition forces are having stopping insurgents in Iraq, a country they have occupied for three years with 130,000 troops. Although SOCOM will be effective tactically -- that is, their operations will likely work -- the strategic effect will be disappointing, like stabbing the sea with a very sharp sword.
Where might SOCOM's expertise prove useful? Perhaps it would be useful against the "resentful state leaders" labeled by journalist Robert Kaplan in a recent Washington Post article as the greatest threat to our well-being.
Kaplan posits that characters like Presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus may acquire nuclear weapons and pay "terrorists" to use them against the United States and our allies. This scenario is not as far-fetched as it might sound. As Iraq demonstrated, countries without a nuclear deterrent are indeed at the mercy of anyone with a modern army, which Western countries undeniably have.
Let's postulate that for some reason -- say to deter what he fears is impending regime change - Mugabe wants the ability to threaten to set off a nuclear weapon in Washington and have his threat taken seriously. He might strike a deal with al-Qaida or some other "terrorist" group to plant the thing.
But if he were clever enough to get his hands on a working device, he also has the much more straightforward option to rent his own apartment within a few miles of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Would he risk giving a nuclear weapon to a third-party "terrorist" group and hope they meet high standards of business ethics?
Nuclear blackmail may well be a legitimate threat, although it isn't "terrorism" so much as it is a logical evolution in state versus state warfare, a poor man's strategic bombing campaign. SOCOM could be effective in a scenario like this, where they might mount a raid of some size to disrupt preparations for the attack and perhaps remove the perpetrator from the scene.
It would require superb intelligence, but good intelligence on Zimbabwe is easier to come by than on shadowy non-state groups like al-Qaida. On balance, SOCOM will likely be effective at the tactical level -- as with a counter-terrorism raid -- and there is also a possibility for success at the strategic level, that is, for positive and lasting effects.
But it is just a possibility, because if we operate as we have in the past and say we will in the future, there is no chance of success. In fact, by advertising that the primary tool in this war is a force of assassins and kidnappers 66,000 strong, the United States could be making itself less safe. In doing so, the world has been divided up into one zone where the norms of international law are obeyed and another where the Pentagon can strike at will.
Should the United States expect the House of War -- to use that deliciously ironic phrase from Islam -- to sit around waiting to get whacked? Or has the U.S. government given the Mugabes and Lukashenkos of the world the moral cover to actually do what Saddam was accused of -- take concrete action to protect themselves from the world's only remaining superpower?
And since nobody can be sure who's on the list or off the list, the U.S. government may also have given someone an incentive to provide the weapon.
On the other hand, a counter-proliferation raiding force could -- and the emphasis is on could -- have a positive impact. For example, if U.S. allies recognize that the state in question is a danger not only to the United States but to the democratic world, they will be more likely to support military action.
After the bombings in Madrid and London, it should not be hard to convince these governments to cooperate if the case is solid. Obviously the United States crying "Wolf!" in Iraq didn't help.
Another consideration is whether the American public and U.S. allies accept military force as appropriate for the situation. For many people, military force is only justified when all other options have been exhausted. It will mean that the U.S. SOCOM force needs to be viewed as the cavalry riding to the rescue and not as cowboys gallivanting around the world. Statements like
"We do not need ambassador-level approval," as reported by Ann Scott Tyson in Sunday's Post, do not help. With patience, honesty and some good intelligence work, objections can be overcome. If not, then perhaps the United States should be listening to what its allies are trying to say.
Finally, SOCOM operations have to be professionally executed, and then the military must get out, quickly. The reason such a raid would prove necessary in the first place is that the target country's economic, social, and political systems are dysfunctional. Military forces cannot help with any of those, but they can catalyze an insurgency.
The "what happens next?" problem is one for the world's diplomats and development experts to consider, and everybody needs to understand that the military is only involved in order to make their jobs possible. Regime change, with the resulting obligation to nursemaid a new one -- even if we can figure out how to do it -- may not be the best option.
Designating SOCOM as DOD's lead element in the "war on terror" makes sense if for no other reason than the other elements of DOD play virtually no role. However, SOCOM is not a panacea -- bin Laden and Mullah Omar have not been found, don't forget. These are difficult operations fraught with military risk but also, given the nature of their targets, with political, social, and religious implications.
To ensure that the first phase of an operation, even if successful, doesn't compromise the other three, the vast majority of our efforts must go into solving the "what next?" issue before the trigger is pulled. As the great 6th Century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once observed, victorious warriors win first, then go into battle.
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Debate versus Division - The Polarization of America
by Mark Lloyd
OpEdNews.com
April 25, 2006
Since arriving from England in 1998,I have played golf every week with a roster of about 12 guys, here in Minneapolis. Almost to a man, they happen to be hard-right Christian conservatives who support Bushco unquestioningly, call the Iraq War "a just and noble cause", think Saddam Hussein perpetrated 9/11 and tell me the likes of Jimmy Carter, Helen Thomas and Garrison Keillor are traitors and should be deported or hung.
They are also good honorable family men and friends of mine.
One of the trends that has most disturbed me, observing over the last 8 years, is the gradual demise and now the almost total lack of political dialogue in this country.
I am not talking about the media. Corporations control the mainstream, and honest debate and reporting of the facts and the truth has been marginalized. Even PBS has become a disappointment.
But it is what it is. And it will inevitably change.
What I am talking about is simply conversations on a golf course. Grassroots debate, if you will pardon the pun - the basic exchange of information and ideas that keeps a free democracy healthy from the ground up.
I remember many lively fairway debates, and many sharp witty follow-up exchanges the following week on the group email. Jokes. Insults. Weblinks and amusing pictures. Sarcasm, irony, truths and half-truths, red herrings and deliberate lies, back-and-forth, give-and-take, points conceded and points stuck to, argued confidently or spuriously clung to.
And next Saturday morning we would all be smiling and shaking hands once again on the 1st tee.
Early this year I sent my final "debate" email to the group. It was titled "no more politics". And I have stuck to my promise.
Why? Am I a coward? Do I not have the courage of my convictions? Am I afraid?
No. It was because debate had ceased. I remember the exact day. I had sent a picture of Bush holding hands with the Crown Prince and pointed out that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian, the Wahabbis finance a great deal of world terrorism, Osama is Saudi Arabian, that the country is a dictatorship and treat women inhumanely. And that Saddam and Al Qaeda were sworn enemies. Simple facts.
The stream of vitriol I received was shocking. Caps. Colors. Limey Go Home! Hypocrite! America-Hater!
So I had a choice. Keep banging my head on a brick wall, or shut up and keep my friends.
It was never like this before. How did it happen?
Is America now so polarized that reasoned debate is obsolete? Have facts and nuance and shades of opinion become irrelevant, buried in the putrid mountain of right-wing soundbites and blatant lies pounded at us repeatedly until we acquiesce, aching head in our hands or in blind acceptance of every word, every half-truth, every spin?
I remember the Bush-Gore debates. I remember Bush with his earpiece, blinking in the headlights, repeating Rovian soundbites, while Gore reasoned, strung logical thoughts together, tried to debate. And I remember the opinion poll afterwards. Majority for Bush, because Gore "came across as arrogant" and Bush "a man of the people". I knew then we were in big trouble. It had worked. And boy have they taken it to the limit.
This is becoming a polarized and divisive nation. A nation of Us vs Them. Of Rich vs Poor. "Immigrants" vs "The People". Christians vs Liberals. False premises all.
A nation of You're With Us Or You're Against Us, of investigative journalists and Democratic dissenters tagged as traitors, of unquestioning faith in the right and might of Bombs Bursting In Air and The Rocket's Red Glare.
Of Christianity vs Islam. Of "Bring 'Em On". Of permanent war and fear.
In a time when grassroots debate has become almost irrelevant to the outcome of elections, in a time of rampant gerrymandering, Diebold machines, televised faux-debates with earpieces and teleprompters, and winners winning because they have the most money, perhaps this dearth of debate no longer matters.
But it matters to me. To millions of regular Americans. Diehard rightwingers like my friends seem to have adopted the tactics of their beloved leader. When faced with Facts and Truth and Alternatives - first ignore or deny - then spin and attack. No debate.
These are sad times indeed. The day I sent that last email was a sad day.
There's no arguing with them anymore. Can anyone say let's nuke Iran? Fore!
Mark Lloyd is a working stiff in Minneapolis. He grew up in Yorkshire, England during the socialist 70's and Thatcher & Reagan's 80's and disliked both mobs. His fierce interest in politics, history and The Truth combined with the appalling start to the 21st century have finally convinced him to start writing again.
Comment: What's really sad is that the author, one of those folks who desires true debate, still believes that 9/11 was carried out by Saudis. Rational thought is far more dead in the US than he realises...
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Officer Shot, Man Killed at Ohio Airport
By THOMAS J. SHEERAN
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
CLEVELAND - A man who argued with workers at an airport ticket counter grabbed a police officer's gun and shot a patrolman before he was killed by another officer Thursday, authorities said.
The patrolman was shot twice in the chest but was in stable condition, authorities said. Another officer was treated for a bite to his neck by the suspect, McGrath said.
The man was identified by the Cuyahoga County Coroner's office as Kenneth Callaway, 38, of Willowick in suburban Cleveland.
The shootings at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport followed a disturbance earlier Thursday morning involving the same man in an airport parking garage, city Safety Director Martin Flask said.
Callaway then tried unsuccessfully to buy a ticket at the Delta Air Lines counter. After arguing with a Delta employee, he went to the adjacent United Airlines ticket counter and bought a ticket to Chicago, Flask said.
The United workers called police about the man, who then got into a confrontation with two officers, authorities said.
Authorities would not give any details on the argument at the ticket counter or the incident in the parking garage.
Flask said the man had a criminal record that included prison stays for burglary and drugs.
The shooting, shortly after 10 a.m., was in an area before security check points. The airport remained open and no flights were delayed. Airport officials led passengers arriving for flights around the crime scene to ticket counters.
The patrolman, Steve Walker, 52, was alert and talking to his wife Thursday afternoon, said Dr. Charles Yowler, a trauma physician at MetroHealth Medical Center. A Cleveland police officer for 18 years, including 10 at the airport, Walker had cracked ribs, a damaged lung and a bullet lodged in his back, the doctor said.
Bernice Walker said her husband of 21 years is a devoted father of two daughters.
Walker was not wearing a bulletproof vest. Police Chief Michael McGrath would not say whether that violated police rules.
Forty Cleveland police officers are assigned to the city-owned airport.
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Construction Begins at Ground Zero
By AMY WESTFELDT
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
NEW YORK - After months of disputes over the future of ground zero, state and city officials finally brought in the heavy equipment and began construction Thursday on the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower that will rise at the World Trade Center site.
"It is going to be a symbol of our freedom and independence," Gov. George Pataki said after three yellow construction trucks - driven by workers wearing hard hats emblazoned with the American flag and the words "Freedom Tower, World Trade Center" - rolled down a ramp to applause from politicians.
The project has been held up by bickering between city and state agencies and the project's chief developer, and by objections, mostly from Sept. 11 family members, to the design of the trade center memorial.
But a breakthrough came this week when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, reached an agreement with developer Larry Silverstein, who held the lease on the twin towers.
The agency had been pressing Silverstein to give up control over the $2.1 billion Freedom Tower, for fear he would not have the financial means to complete the project. Silverstein agreed to surrender control of the skyscraper and a second building, but will build three other office towers at ground zero.
The Freedom Tower is scheduled to open in 2011, and officials said Wednesday's deal means all five towers could be built by 2012. Construction has also begun on the memorial.
The project will return millions of square feet of office space, shops and people to downtown's financial district.
"Everybody had a smile on their face and everybody understands - if you're not happy with the design, you had your chance, if you're not happy with the deal, you had your chance," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "We've finally all come together and said what we're going to do, so now we're going to do it."
Business and civic leaders have wondered whether there is demand for that much office space downtown, and said that the Freedom Tower has not attracted tenants yet because of its height and its potential as a terrorist target.
But Pataki said: "We are not going to just build low in the face of a war against terror."
The Freedom Tower will be as high as the 110-story World Trade Center towers. But an illuminated spire will stretch the building to the symbolic 1,776 feet envisioned in the original Freedom Tower design. That would be taller than any building in existence, although even taller skyscrapers are planned in Chicago and the United Arab Emirates.
Thursday was the second time officials tried to start construction on the tower, which has been designed three times. Architect Daniel Libeskind drew the first Freedom Tower, a twisting glass skyscraper with an off-center spire meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty.
David Childs produced a sleeker version of Libeskind's design, then reworked it again last year after police expressed concerns that the building was not sturdy enough to withstand a truck bomb.
Politicians broke ground on July 4, 2004, with a 20-ton granite cornerstone that has remained encased in blue plywood at the site since construction stalled.
Crews began relocating utilities around the Freedom Tower site weeks ago, and plan to do other work to prepare to lay the foundation over the next month.
Officials said they do not expect any major changes to the Freedom Tower's design or construction schedule now that the Port Authority is taking over
But Childs said the price is likely to go up because of the rising cost of steel and concrete.
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Teen Pleads Guilty to Murder of Schoolmate
By JAN DENNIS
Associated Press
Thu Apr 27, 2006
ROCK ISLAND, Ill. - A teenager accused of helping his ex-girlfriend kill and dismember a 16-year-old classmate pleaded guilty Thursday to murder.
Cory Gregory, 18, had led authorities to the girl's remains, which had been chopped up, burned and dumped in two counties, Rock Island County State's Attorney Jeff Terronez said.
The teenager also agreed to meet with Adrianne Reynolds' family and explain his role in her death.
"That goes a long way to show his remorse," Terronez said.
Prosecutors say Gregory and Sarah Kolb, 18, killed Reynolds in Kolb's car over their school lunch hour at a fast-food restaurant on Jan. 21, 2005, then took the body to Kolb's grandparents' farm and burned it.
The pair returned two days later and sawed the body into pieces, dumping some remains on the farm and burying the rest in Black Hawk State Park in Rock Island, according to prosecutors.
Gregory faces 20 to 40 years in prison at his sentencing July 10, plus two to five years for an earlier plea to concealing a homicide.
Kolb was convicted of murder at her second trial in February and faces more than 60 years in prison.
Prosecutors said Kolb was angry because Reynolds, who had recently moved to the state, was taking her friends and had shown interest in Kolb's boyfriend and Gregory.
Kolb said Gregory killed the girl. In her first trial, which ended in a mistrial, Kolb testified that Gregory strangled Reynolds, then hit Kolb in the face and threatened to kill her, her family and her cats if she reported the crime. She did not testify in her second trial, when the defense rested without presenting a case.
Gregory denied Kolb's account in a television interview.
Defense attorney Steve Hanna said Gregory agreed to the plea deal because the evidence against him was "overwhelming." Under the deal, approved less than a week before his murder trial was to begin, he will not face additional dismemberment charges that could have added 50 years to his sentence.
Gregory's mother wept as the plea was announced and left the courthouse without comment.
The victim's adoptive father, Tony Reynolds, said he asked for the meeting with Gregory.
"I guess I just want to know what happened, why," he said. He said he doesn't know yet what he will say to his daughter's killer.
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Middle East Madness
How Come They Don't Fight Holy Wars with Prayers?
by Richard Mathis
OpEdNews.com
April 27, 2006
If God is all powerful then why does God need help with death and destruction?
Why don't religious fanatics fight holy wars with prayers? After all, you would think that if God was on their side they wouldn't need to fly an airplane into a building or invade a country under false pretenses. If mass destruction is what God wants then how come God isn't already doing it? It wouldn't seem that an omnipotent God would need suicide bombers or nuclear submarines. Surely God already has enough lightning bolts to strike us all down without resorting to scud missiles. Indubitably God has enough plagues without any true believer having to resort to anthrax.
Religious fanatics seem to believe that they need to go ahead and do what God would do if only God knew the facts as the fanatics did and God had as much time on his hands as they do. They're saving God the trouble.
That's why they might pray for God to bring down destruction on the evildoers but go ahead and start implementing the wrath on their own initiative. Surely it's not because they really don't have faith that God won't answer their prayers to strike down their enemies.
Actually, religious fanatics appear to be very frustrated and impatient with God. Maybe they fear that God has gone soft and needs a little help in managing creation. All God needs is a little prompting on their part. If they go ahead and start the carnage, maybe God will remember that he is supposed to be raining down hellfire and brimstone on his enemies, who happen to be exactly the same enemies of the zealots.
Militant religious partisans really have very little faith. They think that their religion can't compete on its own. Thus, they want the government to support their religion. If they can't get people to come on their own to their religious institutions then they try to take over the public institutions. They think the government is the enforcement arm of their one true religion.
But I say that we need to do like the prophet Elijah did with the high priests of false religion. In the 18th chapter of 1st Kings, Elijah challenged the false priests to call upon their god to light a bonfire. And they called on their idol "from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered."
I'm issuing a challenge to the prime zealots in the world, one a Christian and one a Muslim. Both of them are rich boys who like to play politics and religion. They both claim that they're God's chosen man for the hour and that they are making war for the glory of God. Well, fellows, I'm calling you out to a high-noon pray-out in the middle of main street. Leave your weapons at home and come ready to pray. The Christian crusader can pray for God to smite down all the evil doers and the Muslim marauder can pray for Allah to slay all the infidels. And me, I'll just pray for God's will to be done. Whose prayer do you think will be answered?
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Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'
Philip Weiss
The Nation
April 27, 2006
Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.
Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."
The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."
While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard [to get this discussed]," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.
What's more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War was reaching new highs. "The paper was important as a political intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of academic life," says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian suffering under the occupation to Americans' attention. "The reason they're getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle." Bennis and Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the paper's findings. Partly this reflects the paper's origins: Though it was printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don't mean very much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states. For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are so much idealistic fluff.
Given the paper's parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?
Let's begin with the personalities. The more forceful member of the duo (and the one who would talk to me), Mearsheimer, 58, is by nature an outsider. Though he spent ten years of his youth in the military, graduating from West Point, he wasn't much for tents and guns even as he latched on to David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest because it explained a horrible war. Out of pure intellectual curiosity Mearsheimer, who had become an officer in the Air Force, enrolled in graduate school classes at the University of Southern California. Today he is a realist powerhouse at the University of Chicago, publishing such titles as Conventional Deterrence. Like Mearsheimer, Walt, 50, grew up in privilege, but he is a courtly and soft-spoken achiever. Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton figured in his progress to Harvard. "I think Steve enjoyed moving into institutional roles," says one academic. "Steve likes a good argument, but unlike John he can be polite. John enjoys the image of the bomb thrower."
Mearsheimer was hawkish about Israel until the 1990s, when he began to read Israel's "New Historians," a group of Israeli scholars and journalists (among them Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev) who showed that Israel's founders had been at times ruthless toward Palestinians. Mearsheimer's former student Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M, recalls the epiphany: "For a lot of us, who didn't know a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict beyond the conventional wisdom and Leon Uris's Exodus, we saw a cold war ally; and the moral issue and the common democracy reinforced a strong pro-Israel bent." Then Desch rode to a conference with two left-wing Jewish academics familiar with the New Historians. "My initial reaction was the same as John's: This is crazy. [They argued that] the Israelis weren't the victims of the '48 war to destroy the country. Ben-Gurion had real doubts about partition. Jordan and Israel talked about dividing up the West Bank together. All those things were heretical. They seemed to be coming from way, way out in left field. Then we started reading [them], and it completely changed the way we looked at these things." Mearsheimer says he had been blinded by Uris's novel. "The New Historians' work was a great revelation to me. Not only do they provide an abundance of evidence to back up their stories about how Israel was really created, but their stories make perfect sense. There is no way that waves of European Jews moving into a land filled with Palestinians are going to create a Jewish state without breaking a lot of Palestinian heads.... It's just not possible."
September 11 was a catalytic event for the realists. Mearsheimer and Walt came to see the close US alliance with Israel as damaging American relations with other states. American policy toward the Palestinians was serving to foster terrorism, Walt wrote in a book called Taming American Power. And you weren't allowed to discuss it. Walt spoke of the chilling effect of the Israel lobby (on a University of California, Berkeley, TV show called Conversations With History last fall): "Right now, this has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from."
For his part, Mearsheimer saw the lobby's power in an episode in the spring of 2002, when Bush called on Ariel Sharon to withdraw troops from Palestinian towns on the West Bank. Sharon shrugged him off, and Bush caved. Mearsheimer says by e-mail: "At the American Political Science Association convention in the late summer of 2002, I was talking to a friend about the US-Israel relationship. We shared similar views, and agreed that lots of others thought the same way. I said to him over the course of a dinner that I found it quite amazing that despite widespread recognition of the lobby's influence, no one could write about it and get it published in the United States. He told me that he thought that was not the case, because he had a friend at The Atlantic who was looking for just such an article."
The Atlantic had long hoped to assign a piece that would look systematically at where Israel and America shared interests and where those interests conflicted, so as to examine the lobby's impact. The magazine duly commissioned an article in late 2002 by Mearsheimer and Walt, whom Mearsheimer had brought in. "No way I would have done it alone," Mearsheimer says. "You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece."
Mearsheimer and Walt had plenty of ideological company. After 9/11, many other realists were questioning American policy in the Mideast. Stephen Van Evera, an international relations professor at MIT, began writing papers showing that the American failure to deal fairly with the Israel/Palestine conflict was fostering support for Al Qaeda across the Muslim world. Robert Pape, a professor down the hall from Mearsheimer at Chicago, published a book, Dying to Win, showing that suicide bombers were not religiously motivated but were acting pragmatically against occupiers.
The writer Anatol Lieven says he reluctantly took on the issue after 9/11 as a matter of "duty"--when the Carnegie Endowment, where he was a senior associate, asked him to. "I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity.... All my personal loyalties are the other way. I've literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends." Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the issue. "I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel. Attacked as an anti-Semite, Lieven says he became a pariah among many colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment, which he left for the fledgling New America Foundation.
Yet another on this path was the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, a neoconservative-turned-realist. In 2004 he attended Charles Krauthammer's speech at the American Enterprise Institute about spreading democracy and was shocked by the many positive effects Krauthammer saw in the Iraq War. Fukuyama attacked this militaristic thinking in an article in The National Interest. He wrote with sympathy of the Palestinians and said the neoconservatives confused American and Israeli interests. "Are we like Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than an iron fist?... I believe that there are real problems in transposing one situation to the other." Krauthammer responded in personal terms, all but accusing Fukuyama of anti-Semitism. "The remarkable thing about the debate was how oblique Frank's reference to the issue was and how batshit Krauthammer and the other neoconservatives went," says Mike Desch. "It is important to them to keep this a third rail in American politics. They understood that even an elliptical reference would open the door, and they immediately all jumped on Frank to make the point, 'Don't go there.'" It seems to have worked. The soft-spoken Fukuyama left out the critique of the neocon identification with Israel in his recent book, America at the Crossroads.
"We understood there would be a significant price to pay," Mearsheimer says. "We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged." They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. "[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote," managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic's policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
"I believe they got cold feet," Mearsheimer says. "They said they thought the piece was a terrible--they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened." The writing as such can't have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.
That might have been the end of it. The authors "nosed around," Mearsheimer says, looking for another US publisher, then gave up, concluding that the piece could not be published as an article or book in "a mainstream outlet" in the United States. Half a year passed. Then a scholar Mearsheimer will not identify called to say that a staffer at The Atlantic had passed along the piece, which he found "magisterial." The scholar put the authors in touch with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the London Review of Books editor, and last fall she contracted to publish the piece.
"John, who I think is a little bit more hardheaded politically and intellectually, expected what came," Desch says. "Steve was more confident that facts and logic would carry the day, and from some conversations I've had he was clearly shellshocked. He was in an exposed position at Harvard." Desch adds that when the New York Sun linked the authors to white supremacist David Duke, who praised the article, "it came as a real kick in the stomach." Some measure of Walt's exposure is financial. Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought this issue up unprompted to me: "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been seismic.'"
Something in Mearsheimer's spirit would seem to be fulfilled in upsetting people by expressing ideas that he deeply believes. "When you write about this subject and you're critical of Israeli policy or critical of the US-Israel relationship, you are invariably going to be called an anti-Semite," he says. When I said he had autonomy as a professor to enjoy "free discourse" in this country, he said, "What free discourse in the United States? What free discourse are you talking about?" Mearsheimer's friend Van Evera criticizes him for allowing his legitimate anger over being shut out of the discourse to affect the tone of the article. But Mearsheimer was expressing his sharp personality; and doesn't passion give life to an argument?
The authors have gotten support from hundreds of e-mails, three-quarters of which congratulate them, Mearsheimer says. Foreign-service officers in Washington who are frightened by the neoconservative program are said to be excitedly passing the article around. The European left has also welcomed the paper, saying that these issues must be discussed. And even in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha'aretz saying it was a "wake-up call" to Americans about the relationship.
Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is "so incendiary and so complicated that I don't know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that's a problem. But there's not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn't cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched." In Salon Michelle Goldberg wrote that the authors had "blundered forth" into the argument in "clumsy and crude" ways, for instance failing to distinguish between Jewish Likudniks and Jewish support of Democrats in Congress. Noam Chomsky wrote that the authors had ignored the structural forces in the American economy pushing for war, what he calls "the tight state-corporate linkage." Norman Finkelstein makes a similar distinction. "I'm glad they did it," he says of the publication, but he argues that while the pro-Israel lobby controls public debate on the issue, and even Congress, the lobby can't be shown to decide the "elite opinion" that creates policy in the Mideast.
One problem with this argument is that in insisting on the primacy of corporate decision-making, it diminishes the realm of political culture and shows a real dullness about how ideas percolate in Washington. Think tanks, the idea factories that help produce policy, used to have a firmly WASPish character. But as Walt and Mearsheimer show, hawkishly pro-Israel forces have established a "commanding presence" at such organizations over much of the spectrum, from the Brookings Institution in the center to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation on the right. After Bush's 2000 victory, Dick Cheney made sure that his neoconservative friends were posted throughout the Administration, and after 9/11 their militaristic ideas swept the government like a fever. In a fearful time, their utter distrust of Arab and Muslim culture seemed to the Bushies to explain the world. "You have an alliance between neocons and aggressive nationalists that goes back thirty years. Their ideas have bled into one another," says Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service. "And neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute center of their worldview." One of the tenets of neocon belief was that the road to peace in Israel/Palestine led through Baghdad: Give Israel a greater sense of security and you can solve the Palestinian issue later. That has been the government policy.
Lieven says, "It's self-evidently true that other interests and ambitions are involved in the war with Iraq.... Oil is very much--imperial ambitions are very much there." But, he adds, "it is crazy to suggest on the one hand that the neoconservatives had a great influence on the Bush Administration and to say that it didn't play out in terms of a hard interest for Israel. If you think the neocons were not running the whole show but had a definite impact, then you can't possibly suggest that Israeli interests were not involved."
The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons' Israel-centered view of foreign relations. "It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby," Wilmers, LRB's (Jewish) editor, says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel's security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after--horrors--calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker's courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby's powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans' ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.
Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. "If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue--my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government--has so much difficulty publishing, it's a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country."
Realist ideas are resonating now because the utopian ideas that drove the war are so frightening and demoralizing. Indeed, Fukuyama has moved toward what he calls Wilsonian realism. Lieven is about to come out with a book (co-edited with a right-winger from the Heritage Foundation) on ethical realism. These ideas are appealing because they offer a better way of explaining a dangerous world than the idea that our bombs are good bombs and that Muslims only respect force. Left-wingers and liberals who find themselves alienated from the country's warmongering leadership have to acknowledge the potential in these ideas to forge a coalition of outs. But the price of effecting such a realignment is high: It means separating from the Israel lobby (or reforming it!) and trusting that a fairer American policy in the Middle East will not mean abandoning Israel.
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Israel says it would harm relations with Norway if Hamas meets Norwegian authorities next month
The Norway Post
26.04.2006
The two representatives for the elected Palestinian Hamas-government will be received by representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Ambassador Shomrat says such a meeting will imply assisting a terrorist group. She hopes the Government decides not to meet Hamas.
However, a UD spokesman says to NRK that they will themselves decide who they will meet for talks, and that this time they wish to meet with Hamas.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has earlier stated that no government ministers will meet the two Hamas representatives, who have been invited to Norway by a private organization.
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Israel bars Lieberman from public security portfolio over corruption
AFP
April 28, 2006
JERUSALEM - Israel's justice ministry said that the leader of an extreme right political party cannot serve as public security minister, following new evidence relating to a police inquiry into corruption.
Lieberman had been holding out for the post in the incoming coalition led by prime minister designate Ehud Olmert after his ultra-nationalist faction won 11 of the 120 seats in parliament in a March 28 general election.
"Attorney General Menachem Mazuz is opposed to this appointment, with Mr Lieberman subject to a police inquiry that has thrown up further information," ministry spokesman Jacob Galanti told AFP.
Police sources said the new suspicions, whose precise nature were not divulged, concerned a long-running corruption probe into the financing of the 1999 election campaign.
The Maariv newspaper said the new lines of inquiry focused on possible connections between Lieberman and mafia gangs in eastern Europe.
The Yisrael Beitenu leader told reporters, however, he was "surprised" that police are working on new leads "after seven years of an unsuccessful inquiry" just as he had been negotiating an entry into the incoming Israeli government.
Lieberman, whose party's support is drawn largely from immigrants from the former Soviet Union, could yet take up another ministerial portfolio, albeit one less sensitive to police and justice departments.
Yet any prospect of Yisrael Beitenu joining the coalition looked increasingly remote, amid disagreements on its politics, considered too liberal by the rightist Lieberman, and Olmert's plan to redraw the borders of Israel.
The 47-year-old politician has been accused of racism over his calls for the enforced transfer of Israeli Arabs and land to the adjacent West Bank, to compensate for Jewish settlers kicked out of Palestinian territory.
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Ahmadinejad says Germans exploited by 'greedy Zionists'
AFP
Thu Apr 27, 2006
TEHRAN - Hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken a fresh swipe at Israel by complaining that Germany was being exploited by "greedy Zionists" more than 60 years after World War II.
"Look at the German people. Three generations ago, there was a war. But today an intelligent people is still a hostage of World War II," he said Thursday in a speech carried on state television.
Germany, he said, "still doesn't have the right to have independent policies or proper defences."
"Every German born is indebted to the arrogant and greedy Zionists," Ahmadinejad said, referring to German reparations for the Holocaust.
"When you visit a country, in every town there is a symbol of national pride," Ahmadinejad said, but added that in Germany "every town has something saying to the great German people that their parent and grandparents were murderers."
The firebrand president has already dismissed the Holocaust as a "myth" and has also called for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
"Sixty years after the war, why do the Palestinian people have to burn in the crimes of Zionists under the pretext of the Second World War?" the president said in Zanjan, situated 300 kilometres (200 miles) west of Tehran.
"For 60 years they've been massacring Palestinians and destroying their homes under the pretext that a certain number of Jew were killed during World War II," Ahmadinejad said.
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Russia and China warn UN not to antagonise Iran
By Daniel Dombey in Sofia
Financial Times
April 27 2006
Russia and China on Thursday warned against escalating the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme. The call came on the eve of an eagerly awaited report on whether the country has met United Nations demands.
The US and the European Union believe Friday's report by Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will set the stage for a UN Security Council resolution, since there is little chance that Tehran will meet the council's demand for "full and sustained suspension" of uranium enrichment, which can produce weapons-grade material.
But on Thursday Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, warned against too great an intervention by the Security Council - a path Moscow feels could lead to confrontation.
"We think that the IAEA must continue to play a key role and it must not shrug off its responsibilities to resolve such questions and shift them on to the UN Security Council," he said at a summit with Angela Merkel, German chancellor.
European officials argue that, far from sidelining the IAEA, any action by the council would seek to bolster its authority.
The Chinese government also called for restraint. Moscow and Beijing, which have growing energy and economic links with Iran, fear that a UN resolution might be used to justify military action at a later stage.
The US has stepped up efforts to assuage such concerns. "Forcible change of the Iranian regime is not the objective of American policy," Philip Zelikow, a top adviser to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, told the Financial Times.
"Right now, we haven't completed implementing a diplomatic strategy. That diplomatic strategy involves underscoring to the Iranian regime the costs of its behaviour."
US and EU diplomats hope to win Security Council backing for a resolution on Iran by mid-June. Such a resolution would not involve sanctions but would probably set out a new deadline for Iran to halt nuclear enrichment.
Mr ElBaradei has been pushing Iran for a "technical break" in uranium enrichment to allow negotiations over the nuclear programme to resume.
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Around the World
Musharraf insists: I'm not George Bush's poodle
Declan Walsh and Simon Tisdall in Rawalpindi
The Guardian
Friday April 28, 2006
General Pervez Musharraf, facing a surge of anti-American sentiment, yesterday warned that covert US air strikes against al-Qaida inside Pakistan were an infringement of national sovereignty.
Admitting that his popularity was waning, the Pakistani president insisted he was "not a poodle" of George Bush and rejected accusations he was running a military dictatorship.
Speaking to the Guardian at Army House in Rawalpindi weeks after a tense visit by the US president that brought a torrent of domestic criticism, Gen Musharraf insisted he was his own man.
"When you are talking about fighting terrorism or extremism, I'm not doing that for the US or Britain. I'm doing it for Pakistan," he said. "It's not a question of being a poodle. I'm nobody's poodle. I have enough strength of my own to lead."
If necessary he had "teeth" to bite back, he added. "Yes sir, I personally do. A lot of teeth. Sometimes the teeth do not have to be shown. Pragmatism is required in international relations."
Gen Musharraf pledged to hold free and fair elections next year as urged by Mr Bush during his visit to Islamabad last month. Opposition parties fear the poll, which government officials claim will be the most open since Gen Musharraf seized power in 1999, will be rigged.
"It is ironic that I'm sitting in uniform talking of democracy ... but to bring democracy into Pakistan I thought I needed it," he said.
An American Predator drone fired Hellfire missiles at a house in Bajaur tribal agency in January, killing 18 people but missing their target, al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The attack near the Afghan border caused public uproar and brought renewed accusations that Gen Musharraf was a US puppet.
Local journalist Hayatullah Khan, who photographed missile fragments linking the strikes to the US, disappeared four days later and is still missing. A western diplomat said he was probably being held by Pakistani intelligence and may have been mistreated.
The strike underlined tensions in the anti-terror alliance between Pakistan and the US, which has also been strained by Washington's nuclear deal with India, its insistence on democratic reforms, and alleged American meddling in the sprawling south-western province of Baluchistan. "The strike was an infringement of our sovereignty and I condemned it," said Gen Musharraf.
Pakistan also faces criticism from the US and Afghanistan for not doing enough to flush extremists from its tribal areas. Mr Bush said he had come to Islamabad "to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists to justice".
Gen Musharraf insisted yesterday there was no question of Pakistan submitting to American scrutiny and said claims that his government acted at Washington's bidding were nonsense. "There is no need of any checks - that is the reality," he said.
Gen Musharraf, who faces revolts in Baluchistan and along the Afghan border, admitted to feeling embattled. He added that there was a growing problem of "Talibanisation" in Waziristan, a troubled tribal area where several hundred al-Qaida suspects have been killed.
The battle against al-Qaida was almost won in Waziristan, he said. "Because of our successes in the cities where we got 600-700 of them, and then in the mountains where we occupied their sanctuaries, thankfully they are on the run."
But a new form of local fundamentalism was taking its place in Waziristan, which is ruled directly from Islamabad under colonial-era laws. "Extremism in a Talibanised form is what people are now going for. Mullah Omar and the Taliban have influence in Waziristan and it's spilling over into our settled areas."
This week militants occupied a market in the regional capital, Miran Shah, for several hours, burning newspapers and threatening local people. Two taxi drivers accused of collaborating with coalition forces in nearby Afghanistan were found beheaded. More than 150 pro-government elders and officials have been killed in the past year.
Gen Musharraf defended his tactic of using military force instead of negotiation to quell the violence and said some collateral damage was inevitable when militants' hideouts were attacked.
"We take extreme care to be 100% sure of the target from all sources of intelligence ... There is minimum collateral damage. If someone happens to be very close to [the target], that somebody is an abetter and they suffer the loss. Sometimes, indeed, women and children have been killed but they have been right next to the place. It's not that the strike was inaccurate but they happen to be there, so therefore they are all supporters and abetters of terrorism - and therefore they have to suffer. It's bad luck," he said.
Gen Musharraf also played down unrest in the resource-rich province of Baluchistan, where nationalist militants are blowing up gas pipelines and trains and attacking army positions. He described the rebels as "mercenaries" and their attacks as "pin pricks", and said the disturbances were confined to one-twentieth of the province's area.
"So what revolt are you talking about? People talk about an East Pakistan situation," he said, referring to the secession of Bangladesh in 1971. "I understand strategy. These people are pygmies."
Criticism of his military-driven strategy came from "people who sit in drawing rooms and talk", he said, but added that a political solution was also being sought.
Gen Musharraf has survived two assassination attempts but elections scheduled for next year are expected to pose the greatest threat yet to his grip on power. Overt and behind-the-scenes US and British pressure for a free poll has become another friction point in the west's relationship with Islamabad.
The leaders of the two main opposition parties, Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan Peoples party and Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League, are in exile and face arrest if they return home. Meeting in London this week they launched a fresh political alliance and called for western support.
Gen Musharraf said his mission was to democratise Pakistan. "My popularity has gone down ... but at this moment my country needs me. I've put a strong constitutional democratic system in place. That will throw up a successor. I'm a strong believer in democracy."
Backstory
Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 when he was head of the country's armed forces, forcing the country's elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, into exile in Saudi Arabia. Initial international condemnation faded after September 2001, when Gen Musharraf dropped his support for the Taliban and threw his weight behind the US-led "war on terror". He has since become a key ally in the west's hunt for al-Qaida extremists but his popularity has plummeted due to widespread anti-American sentiment. In December 2003 he survived two al-Qaida assassination attempts in two weeks. Gen Musharraf attempted to legitimise his rule through elections in 2002 that observers described as deeply flawed. A self-described liberal, he has introduced some social reforms but also allied himself with hardline religious parties when necessary. Last year he advanced the peace process with India through "cricket diplomacy".
Comment: We beg to differ with the good general. It is well known that the CIA armed Islamic "terrorists" in Afghanistan through Pakistan's ISI back in the days of the good old Evil Commie Soviet Empire. And it doesn't end there: Pakistan and the ISI played a very interesting role in 9/11! Click here for more.
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Italy's new leader: U.S. will still be a friend
By Eric J. Lyman
Special for USA TODAY
4/28/2006
ROME - Incoming Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi offered assurances Thursday that U.S.-Italian ties would remain strong, but he emphasized that he is an advocate of European integration and opposes the war in Iraq.
In his first interview with a U.S. newspaper since his victory over Silvio Berlusconi in elections this month, Prodi, 66, discussed issues ranging from what he called his "friendship" with President Bush to the war on terror to domestic priorities, including better coordination with the rest of Europe.
As prime minister, Berlusconi forged a strong personal relationship with Bush, and Prodi's approach to U.S. relations became an issue during the campaign for the election April 9-10.
Prodi, a former prime minister and European Commission president, said he plans to stress relations within Europe more than his predecessor.
He added that there would not be any dramatic change in Italy's ties with the United States.
"I have never had anything but a strong relationship with the United States: I stood shoulder to shoulder with President Clinton when I was prime minister the first time (1996-1998), and I have worked well with President Bush when I was European Commission president," Prodi said in the interview, conducted at the headquarters of the Ulivo Party, the leading party in his coalition. "We have agreed on most things, with one significant exception: the war in Iraq."
Berlusconi supported the U.S. invasion and the war. He deployed nearly 3,500 troops in 2003 - at the time, the third-largest troop contingent after the United States and Britain.
He also backed most U.S. international policies. In March, less than a month before the Italian elections, Berlusconi addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
Prodi has criticized the U.S.-led war in Iraq. By the time Italy held its election, both candidates vowed to have the 2,900 Italian troops home by the end of the year.
Despite concerns about the war - including the deaths Thursday of three Italian soldiers in a roadside bombing in southern Iraq - Prodi said he would not immediately withdraw Italian forces.
"I remain pessimistic about both Iraq and also about Afghanistan, because the task in those countries is impossible: to build something stable on a situation that is not stable. But we are not trying to escape our responsibilities in Iraq," he said.
He said he saw a different role for Italian personnel: "We know it is important to participate in the rebuilding of the country. But it will not be in combat positions."
Prodi called himself a friend of Bush. He recalled riding a bike alongside Bush, who was on a run, in Atlanta.
Prodi said friendship does not mean he always has to agree with U.S. policy.
"I have good feelings about President Bush," he said. "But because of our friendship, it is important to tell the truth, to be honest about points of dissent."
Prodi said that when Bush called to congratulate him on his electoral victory last week, the U.S. president said the two leaders would meet soon, in Washington or at the Group of Eight summit of leading industrial nations in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July.
"I hope to go to Washington soon," Prodi said. "But considering I am not even in the government yet, I think it will be some time after I see President Bush in Russia."
The process of forming a government begins today with a vote for leader of the Senate - a test for Prodi's coalition, which holds a slim majority in the Senate.
Discussing the international war on terrorism, Prodi said efforts should be, for the most part, pan-European. "Italy is a midrange power," he said. "What can we do alone? But in a European context, we can be effective."
Prodi said he will focus domestically on reviving the slowest-growing economy in the European Union and reducing the budget deficit, which was 4.1% of the gross domestic product in 2005.
He also said he wants antitrust officials to look into the television media sector, much of which Berlusconi controls, to allow more competition.
Prodi's promotion of the continued integration of Europe promises to be a top focus of his administration.
"In the Renaissance, the powerful cities in Italy like Rome, Florence and Venice were without rival," said Prodi, a historian and economist. "They led the world in banking, wealth, trade, technology, military strength, agriculture and art and culture. But they did not unite, and so they disappeared."
He warned: "That is the precise point where Europe finds itself now. We have to work together or risk becoming irrelevant."
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Kagame accuses France of complicity in genocide
AFP
April 26, 2006
MONTREAL - Rwandan President Paul Kagame, during an unofficial visit to Canada, accused France of playing a "direct role" in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
In an interview with La Presse published on Wednesday, Kagame said: "It was a direct role. The French gave direct aid to the government to commit the genocide in Rwanda.
"They participated by training local militia, by training the Interahamwe, by providing personnel to man roadblocks where passersby were asked their ethnicity. That is known. These are facts," he told the French-language newspaper.
"The international community must tell us why they do not look at these facts."
Kagame made several speeches and was awarded honors by a local university during his visit to Canada, sparking controversy.
The Rwandan president had previously accused France of complicity in the genocide, but the language he used in his comments to La Presse was stronger than in earlier remarks.
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France to get Internet game to explain budget
AFP
April 26, 2006
PARIS - The French government is to launch an Internet game called Cyberbudget to help teach the public about the difficulties of balancing the country's books, Budget Minister Jean-Francois Cope said Wednesday.
In a speech announcing new arrangements for income tax collection, Cope said the game will be available online by the end of May.
"It is an idea which comes from Japan and we've adapted it for the public at large. Players have to take my place as budget minister, draw up the state budget and then manage it in the face of unforeseen circumstances. It should be a fun way to think about budget issues," he said.
Media reports said that up to 10,000 players will be
able to take part simultaneously.
"The French want reforms but they gnash their teeth whenever it's a question of cutting costs. So this is a way of familiarising them with the budget," Cope told Le Parisien newspaper.
Virtual ministers will have to control some 300 billion euros (370 billion dollars) of expenditure, taking care to keep the annual deficit within three percent and overall debt within 60 percent of output in accordance with EU rules.
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For Your Health
Australian research shows mobile phones affect brain function
AFP
April 27, 2006
Radiation from mobile phone phones affects the way the brain works, Australian researchers have found.
Scientists from Swinburne University of Technology's Brain Sciences Institute in Melbourne found people's response times slowed during a 30-minute mobile phone call but their memory appeared to improve.
The researchers conducted a series of psychological tests on 120 volunteers as they were exposed to mobile phone emissions for half an hour.
Another set of tests was conducted on volunteers who were not exposed to mobile phone radiation but thought they were.
The results, published in April's edition of the journal Neuropsychologia, showed a small but discernable change in brain function among those who were exposed to the electromagnetic fields that mobile phones generate.
"The study showed evidence of slower response times for participants undertaking simple reactions and more complex reactions, such as choosing a response when there is more than one alternative," lead researcher Con Stough said.
"This could equate to driving a car and being distracted by another car pulling out in front of you. The drivers reaction time to chose between braking, turning or sounding the horn, could be affected, albeit slightly.
"The study also found that radiation from mobile phones seems to improve working memory, used for example when remembering a phone number long enough to dial it."
He said further work was needed using magnetic resonance imaging to clarify the way mobile phones alter on the way the brain works.
Stough said further, as-yet-unpublished, research by his team suggested the impact of mobile phone radiation on the brain was cumulative.
"People, for instance, who use the mobile phone a lot seem to have more of an impairment than people who are more naive users," he said.
However, he stressed that the impact on brain function was small and the study did not find that mobile phones caused a health problem.
"We haven't established that there's negative health consequences -- that's a different type of study," he said.
"We're just showing that the radiation is actually active on the brain. But the impairment is small. The convenience and the way that we communicate now these days outweighs that effect."
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Circumcision, Fidelity More Effective HIV Prevention Methods Than Condoms, Abstinence, Researchers Say
Medical News Today
27 Apr 2006
Promoting male circumcision and fidelity to one partner seems to be more effective at curbing the spread of HIV than promoting abstinence and condom use, USAID researcher and technical adviser Daniel Halperin said last week, the Chicago Tribune reports. As Halperin and other researchers analyze 20 years of studies on HIV/AIDS throughout Africa, they have tried to "put aside intuitions, emotions, ideologies and look at the evidence in as coldhearted a way as we can," Halperin said. During a speech at a meeting of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society in Johannesburg, South Africa, Halperin said he and his colleagues discovered that regular sex partners rarely use condoms, and abstinence merely delays HIV infection among young people by one or two years.
For example, condom use in Ghana and Senegal seems to have helped in the reduction of the spread of the HIV, which in those countries is particularly prevalent among commercial sex workers and their partners. However, condom use in South Africa and Botswana has had little effect in reducing those countries' HIV epidemics -- which have reached the general population -- because regular sex partners rarely use condoms consistently. In comparison, faithfulness to one partner has worked at reducing HIV prevalence in Uganda and Kenya, according to Halperin.
Because a person is more likely to transmit HIV during the first three weeks of contracting the virus, an HIV-positive person who has just one partner during that time is likely to pass the disease to that one person. But if an HIV-positive person in the highly infectious stage has many sexual partners at a time, "the virus spreads like wildfire" as those people in turn have sex with other people, Halperin said.
In addition, circumcision has been shown to reduce male-to-female HIV transmission by 60% to 75% (Goering, Chicago Tribune, 4/23). A study published in the November 2005 issue of PLoS Medicine of men living in South Africa finds that male circumcision might reduce the risk of men contracting HIV through sexual intercourse with women by about 60%. Male circumcision might also reduce the risk of HIV transmission from HIV-positive men to their female partners, according to a study of couples in Rakai, Uganda (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 2/9).
Poverty Reduction, Status Awareness
In addition, poverty does not appear necessarily to make a person more susceptible to HIV. "[C]ontrary to popular wisdom, as income levels go up in both men and women, we see higher rates of HIV," Halperin said, adding that people who make more money tend to have more sexual partners. Other HIV prevention methods such as encouraging people to know their status and treating secondary sexually transmitted infections also have not proven effective, Halperin said (Chicago Tribune, 4/23).
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One feared dead in France from slimming pills
AFP
April 26, 2006
PARIS - One person is believed to have died and five others were in intensive care in French hospitals Wednesday after taking slimming pills containing the thyroid glands of pigs, health officials said.
Authorities were trying to contact more than 70 people who are thought to have taken the capsules, all prepared by a single pharmacist in the 17th arrondissement, or district, of Paris.
The use of animal thyroid extract in slimming pills is banned in the French medical profession's code of ethics, but it is not against the law.
Normally prescribed to help patients with over-active thyroid glands or diabetes, the treatment is supposed to boost metabolism and limit the body's absorption of fats and sugars.
Analysis of the suspect capsules showed that they contain accepted amounts of dried pig thyroid extract, but also large amounts of "another substance of thyroid origin which was not part of the prescribed preparation," the health ministry said.
Further tests were under way to determine the nature of this substance.
The alarm was raised after a person -- whose name and sex have not been made public -- died in a Paris hospital on April 18.
Since then 16 people have been hospitalised after experiencing symptoms including palpitations, fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.
The five in intensive care are either in a coma or suffering from "neurological difficulties," according to Didier Houssin, director-general at the health ministry.
A judicial investigation has been opened, and the Order of Doctors -- the medical profession's official body -- has also launched an enquiry. The pharmacy where the capsules were prepared has been provisionally closed.
The affair has focussed critical attention on the fashion for quick-fix weight cures, many accessible via the Internet, and prompted calls for more effective regulation.
Those who took the white-and-blue capsules were all prescribed them by an endocrinologist -- a gland and hormone specialist -- as an effective way of losing weight.
"In normal doses this treatment is not at all dangerous. Of course if there are 20 times the correct amounts of thyroid extract, it will act as a poison. But I prescribed a normal treatment," the specialist -- named only Olivier C. -- told Le Parisien newspaper.
But senior health officials said unscrupulous doctors were making money out of a treatment that should be confined to genuine medical disorders.
"This affair shows how some doctors are prepared to take leave of the rules and do whatever they like. ... It is revolting behaviour," said Patrick Pelloux, president of the Association of Emergency Hospital Doctors.
"Many women fall victim to these practices because they are ruled by the slimming dictatorship. But these irregular weight treatments are extremely dangerous for the health, and now we have the startling proof. We urgently need tighter controls," he said.
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Hospitals Offer Obesity Programs for Kids
By JENNIFER C. YATES
Associated Press
April 27, 2006
PITTSBURGH - As the waistlines of America's young keep expanding, more hospitals are establishing weight management centers for kids. The programs offer a variety of resources, from nutritional counseling to bariatric surgery for the most extreme cases.
Diane Nellis was worried about the health of her teenage son who weighed 240 pounds. But she didn't put him on a diet. Or send him to a fat camp. She took him to a hospital. There, Trevor Nellis, 17, learned to limit portions to the size of his fist, cut out fast food and soda, and eat more fruits and vegetables. Six months later, he has lost nearly 40 pounds and runs three miles a day.
"We try to promote healthy behavior for a lifetime," said Dr. Goutham Rao, clinical director of the Weight Management and Wellness Center at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh where Trevor got help.
Rao said that when the hospital began planning for the clinic about three years ago, there were about half a dozen similar programs across the country. Now, there are around 50 and more on the way, he said.
The clinics are opening at a time of skyrocketing obesity rates among U.S. children. Nearly 1 out of 5 is obese, according to government figures, putting them at a greater risk for diabetes, heart disease and a host of other problems.
Dr. Sandra Hassink, director of the weight management program at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., said she's seen patients getting younger and heavier since she helped start the program 18 years ago. Her youngest patient was 5 months old.
"It's scary and we're going to end up with young adults who should be healthy who are bearing the burden of a chronic illness," she said.
A member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' obesity task force and lead editor of the "Parent's Guide to Obesity," Hassink said parents must be involved if a child is going to succeed at keeping weight under control.
Children usually aren't shopping for food or making decisions about what to eat for dinner, said Dr. Christopher Bolling of Cincinnati Children's Medical Center.
"You're not going to have any success if you approach just the child because the child doesn't have complete regulation over the environment. You have to go after the family," said Bolling, medical director for the Cincinnati hospital's weight management center.
Bolling said one of the biggest challenges is finding a way to pay for the weight programs, which usually aren't covered by insurance. Thanks to a $3 million federal grant, the Pittsburgh clinic doesn't charge its patients for the service.
But doctors say no matter what the cost, it's far less than the expense of treating problems from obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitals spent $127 million in 1999 on obesity-related illnesses, up from $35 million in 1981.
At the Pittsburgh hospital program, children see exercise physiologists and behavioral psychologists, along with medical doctors.
Children and their parents are asked to sign a "contract" promising to pursue healthy habits - from changing the way they eat to being more physically active. The words obesity and fat are avoided.
Located in a medical building near the hospital, the clinic's waiting room offers some larger-than-normal chairs for bigger frames.
A nervous Abigail Auria sat in one of the clinic's patient rooms recently, clad in her bathing suit under a paper hospital gown. It was the 12-year-old's first visit and she was waiting to get into the BodPod, an oval, space-age looking contraption that checks kids' body-mass index.
Abigail was referred to the hospital by her pediatrician, who noticed she had been steadily gaining weight.
"It embarrasses me," the girl said.
Her mom, Jamie Auria, who is a diabetic, hopes the center will help her daughter change her lifestyle and avoid getting diabetes herself.
"We don't want to add any risk to what she already has to deal with," Auria said. "But knowing and understanding and actually doing are two different things."
Down the hall, Trevor and his mom proudly talk about all he's accomplished with the center's help. Trevor said talking with doctors about weight loss was different from discussing it with his parents.
"I heard it all the time," Trevor said, "but something like this really motivates you to do it."
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The Weird and the Wacky
Novel by Harvard Author Pulled From Stores
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
April 27, 2006
NEW YORK - A teen novel containing admittedly borrowed material has been pulled from the market. Author Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard University sophomore, had acknowledged that numerous passages in "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" were lifted from another writer.
Publisher Little, Brown and Company, which had signed Viswanathan to a reported six-figure deal, said in a statement Thursday that it had notified retail and wholesale outlets to stop selling copies of the book, and to return unsold copies to the publisher.
Viswanathan has apologized repeatedly for lifting material from Megan McCafferty, whose books include "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," saying she had read McCafferty's books voraciously in high school and unintentionally mimicked them.
But McCafferty's publisher, the Crown Publishing Group, labeled Viswanathan's actions "literary identity theft" and had urged Little, Brown, which initially said her novel would remain on sale, to withdraw the book.
In a statement issued soon after Little, Brown's announcement, Crown said it was "pleased that this matter has been resolved in an appropriate and timely fashion" and also praised McCafferty for "her grace under pressure throughout this ordeal." McCafferty, in a statement released by Crown, said she was "not seeking restitution in any form" and hoped to put the affair behind her.
"The past few weeks have been very difficult, and I am most grateful to my readers for offering continual support," she said. "In my career, I am, first and foremost, a writer. So I look forward to getting back to work and moving on, and hope Ms. Viswanathan can too."
"How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" came out in March with a first printing of 100,000, sold moderately and was No. 96 on the Amazon.com best seller list Thursday night. DreamWorks has already acquired film rights.
Little, Brown has said the book will be revised as quickly as possible.
Similarities to McCafferty's books, which include "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," were first spotted by readers. They alerted McCafferty, who in turn notified her publisher. Crown alleges that at least 40 passages "contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure."
In its statement, Little, Brown did not say how many passages would be revised.
Viswanathan was assisted by 17th Street Productions, a book packager specializing in teen narratives, but Little, Brown has said that the writing was all hers.
Viswanathan has said she read McCafferty's books three or four times while in high school but didn't bring them to Harvard with her and didn't consult them while writing.
"When I sat down to write my novel, my only intention was to tell the story of Opal," she said in a statement earlier this week. "I was so surprised and horrified when I found these similarities."
Viswanathan's novel tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen from New Jersey who earns straight A's in high school but who gets rejected from Harvard because she forgot to have a social life. Opal's father concocts a plan code-named HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life) to get her past the admissions office.
McCafferty's books follow a heroine named Jessica, a New Jersey girl who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend. McCafferty is a former editor at Cosmopolitan. Her third novel, "Charmed Thirds," was released two weeks ago.
Other books over the years have been withdrawn because of plagiarism allegations, notably Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," which was pulled in 2002.
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Latest 'Da Vinci' mystery: Judge's own secret code
By Reuters
April 27, 2006
Three weeks after a British court passed judgment in the copyright case involving Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code," a lawyer has uncovered what may be a secret message buried in the text of the ruling.
Lawyer Dan Tench noticed some letters in the judgment had been italicized, and it suddenly dawned on him that they spelled a phrase that included the name of the judge: "Smith code."
Justice Peter Smith, who during the trial displayed a sense of humor unusual in the rarified world of bewigged barristers and ancient tradition, appears to have embraced the mysterious world of codes and conspiracy that run through the novel.
"I thought it was a mistake, that there were some stray letters that had been italicized because the word processor had gone wrong," Tench told Reuters.
Tench initially told The Times newspaper that apparently random letters in the judge's ruling appeared in italics. Wouldn't it be clever if the judge had embedded a secret message in the text? The Times ran a jokey item.
"And then I got an e-mail from the judge," said Tench.
He said Smith told him to look back at the first paragraphs. The italicized letters scattered throughout the judgment spell out: "smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz."
Those in the first paragraphs spell out "smith code."
But what does the rest mean?
The novel, and upcoming movie starring Tom Hanks, are about a secret code that reveals ancient mysteries about Jesus Christ.
Smith, who ruled that author Brown had not plagiarized his hugely popular thriller from another book, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," has so far not given any clues to his own mystery code.
For now, the judge is not speaking. His clerk said he is refusing interviews. She would not confirm whether there truly was a secret mystery embedded in his judgment.
But she did confirm that he is, generally speaking, a humorous type of person.
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Ark's Quantum Quirks
Ark
Signs of the Times
April 28, 2006
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