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Editorial: Wal-Mart's data center remains mystery
By Max McCoy
Globe Investigative Writer
JANE, Mo. - Call it Area 71.
Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.
The 125,000-square-foot building, tucked behind a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, is only a stone's throw from the Arkansas line and about 15 miles from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
There is nothing about the building to give even a hint that Wal-Mart owns it.
Despite the glimpses through the fence of manicured grass and carefully placed trees, the overall impression is that this is a secure site that could withstand just about anything. Earth is packed against the sides. The green roof - meant, perhaps, to blend into the surrounding Ozarks hills - bristles with dish antennas. On one of the heavy steel gates at the guardhouse is a notice that visitors must use the intercom for assistance.
What the building houses is a mystery.
Speculation
Wal-Mart's ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.
"We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum. At the time, it struck me as unbelievably outlandish because of the amount of data storage required."
But Wal-Mart, according to a 2004 New York Times article, had enough storage capacity to contain twice the amount of all the information available on the Internet. For the technically minded, the exact amount was for 460 terabytes of data. The prefix tera comes from the Greek word for monster, and a terabyte is a trillion bytes, the basic unit of computer storage.
Albrecht, founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, said she never could confirm the contractor's story. That is not surprising, since Wal-Mart seldom comments on its data capabilities and operations.
A Globe request for information about the Jane data center was referred at Wal-Mart headquarters to Carrie Thum, a senior information officer and former lobbyist for the retailer.
"This is not something that we discuss publicly," Thum said. "We have no comment. And that's off the record."
Skeleton crew
The Jane data center is an enigmatic icon to the power of data, which has helped Wal-Mart become the largest retailer in the world, and to the corporation's growing secrecy since founder Sam Walton's death in 1992. When Wal-Mart constructed its primary data center at corporate headquarters in 1989, it wasn't much of a secret: It was the largest poured concrete structure in Arkansas at the time, and Walton himself ordered a third story.
"Not only had we completely designed it, we were under construction," said Bill Ferguson, a founder of Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects in Memphis, Tenn. "They were pouring foundations, and Sam walked across the parking lot one Friday at the end of the day and said, 'You know, let's add a third floor and put some people up there.'"
Ferguson said the Bentonville data center is built on bedrock and is designed to withstand most natural and man-made disasters, but is not impregnable. The biggest danger, he said, is the area's frequently violent thunderstorms.
"We studied making it tornado-proof, which is difficult," he said. "We calculated the probability of a category 5 tornado hitting it, which was less likely than an airplane crashing into it head-on. At the time, they decided not to."
Since then, Ferguson said, changes have been made to increase the integrity of the structure. The data center was designed with backup generators, fuel on site, and room and board for a skeleton crew in the event an emergency required an extended stay.
Ferguson said his firm learned to design data centers by working with FedEx, which also is based in Memphis, and that the 1989 Wal-Mart data center was built so that it could communicate via any means available - including copper wire, fiber optics and satellites.
The firm no longer works with Wal-Mart, and Ferguson said he had no knowledge of the design or purpose of the data center in Jane. But he suggested that Jim Liles, a Memphis engineer, might know.
Liles said he was a consultant on the Jane project, and that Crossland Construction was the contractor, but he was reluctant to say much else. "As far as what its purpose is, all that has to come from Wal-Mart," Liles said.
Crossland Construction, based in Columbus, Kan., said Tim Oelke of the company's Rogers, Ark., office had been in charge. Oelke did not return a phone call seeking comment.
'Never saw a plan'
The data center was completed in 2004 and was part of a project that included the Supercenter, which opened early last year, and a warehouse. The resulting economic impact on McDonald County, known for its rolling hills and lazy rivers, is difficult to underestimate, said Rusty Enlow.
"Just a few years ago, one new store would have been a big deal," Enlow said. "And I'm not talking about a Supercenter. Just a gas station would have generated excitement."
Now, Enlow said, the county's tax base has doubled, and land is going for about $2,100 an acre, about twice what it was before the project was announced in 2001.
Enlow is chairman of the county planning commission, a body created by popular vote in 1964 but which had not met until this month. Enlow said he doesn't know why the commission never met, but he believes it was because whatever problem prompted its creation was solved before the board was appointed. He also said he's not sure the planning commission has any real authority, or would want any (there is no zoning in the county), but that he and the other 18 members are eager to bring even more business into the county.
"It seems with the opening of that store there has just been a lot of activity," he said. "McDonald County has always been a poor county, but we are in an excellent position now. We're a friendly place, and we're open to things."
Wal-Mart, Enlow said, had created a business synergy that was helping the county of 22,000 shed its hillbilly stereotype.
Enlow was director of the McDonald County Economic Development Council when Wal-Mart quietly began scouting for land. Only after the land had been bought south of the then-unincorporated community of Jane was it announced that the project was Wal-Mart's, and even then, plans for the data center were closely held.
"I never even saw a plan on it," Enlow said.
But Enlow said he watched during the construction of the data center, and that it appeared to be a single-story building that was built "like a bunker," with mounds of earth piled against the sides. He later was told that it would employ 15 to 20 people, and that the building was for data storage.
To facilitate the project, the Missouri Department of Transportation agreed to widen Highway 71 to four lanes from Jane to the Arkansas line; a grant was used to expand the public water district; and the Army Corps of Engineers approved a request to fill in a small portion of wetland along Bear Hollow Road.
Meanwhile, the village of Jane incorporated.
In April 2005, Wal-Mart used the 160,000-square-foot Supercenter to demonstrate its micro-merchandising capabilities as part of a media conference. Employees demonstrated hand-held Telxon (pronounced Tel-zon) computers, which resemble hand scanners but hold a year's worth of a particular store's sales history on every item. The devices help store managers decide what to stock.
Bananas are Wal-Mart's best-selling produce product nationwide, but at Jane, the top seller was lettuce, Supermarket News reported after the event.
'Secretive'
Bill Wilson, McDonald County presiding commissioner, said he has never been inside the green-roofed data center, and that to his knowledge, only one county official has: Assessor Laura Pope.
"I had to sign a document saying that I wouldn't talk about what's in there," Pope said. "I've never been in a situation to tour anything like that before. I don't want to be secretive about it. Basically, it houses computer equipment."
Pope said she had never been asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement before in her job as assessor, and that she didn't keep a copy. She said she didn't appraise the building and equipment, but rather came to an agreement with Wal-Mart on what it was worth.
They agreed that the data center would be worth $10.7 million at fair market value, she said. The equipment inside the center was judged to be worth nearly three times as much: $31.7 million.
The taxes that Wal-Mart paid last year on the data center totaled just more than $500,000: $128,091 for the real estate and $373,091 for the equipment.
Pope said she did not place a value on the data stored at the building. At an estimated worth of $42.4 million, is the Wal-Mart data center at Jane important enough to the infrastructure of the state - or the country - to be on Missouri's list of critical assets?
Paul Fennewald, Missouri Homeland Security coordinator, said the list is confidential, and that he could neither confirm nor deny that the Jane building is on it. He did say that the list includes 4,000 to 4,500 sites across the state.
'Retail surveillance'
Albrecht, the consumer activist, said that when the contractor came to her with the story about Wal-Mart wanting to biometrically identify customers through video, one of the reasons given was to help law enforcement.
"You could search for all sales of a particular kind of rope and get a photo of who bought it," she said. "On the other end, you could research all of the purchases of a particular individual, even if they paid in cash."
Albrecht is the co-author of "Spychips," about the use of RFID, or radio frequency identification devices, by the government and corporations to track individuals. She lives in Nashua, N.H., and is getting ready to receive a doctorate of education in consumer education.
"To the best of our knowledge, the only consumer-level item that is (RFID) tagged at Wal-Mart are Hewlett-Packard products and some Sanyo television sets," she said. "Now, the privacy implications of that are fairly trivial, because you're not going to be walking down the street carrying your printer box in your back pocket."
But in 2003, she said, Wal-Mart did two experiments using RFID on smaller items: razor blades and lipstick.
At Brockton, Mass., Albrecht said, the company used a surveillance camera on a shelf that was linked to chips in packages of razor blades. When someone picked up a package, she said, the shelf camera would be activated. Another camera would take a mug shot of the customer at the checkout stand.
At Broken Arrow, Okla., she said, the company linked devices in packages of lipstick that triggered a camera that allowed the lipstick manufacturer to watch consumers on live video.
The experiments apparently were aimed at decreasing theft or for use in merchandise research, she said. "Since 1999, I've been working on a phenomenon called retail surveillance, which is a whole panoply of technologies that are being secretly deployed," she said. "I think most people, when they learn about these technologies, are quite disturbed. There's a sense that when you enter a retail space, you should retain some degree of privacy."
But, Albrecht said, there's a push among retailers to collect as much information about their customers as possible - and to keep the lower-profit individuals, known as "barnacles" and "bottom-feeders," away.
"There's a lot of hand-wringing about how we can find out even more about our customers," she said. "And to the extent that Wal-Mart may be creating the ability to monitor consumers by RFID and identify them by video, I'm extremely concerned. ... If that's the case, they would need that kind of data storage."
Wal-Mart's stand on RFID
"Electronic product codes (EPCs) can best be described as the next generation of bar codes. Unlike current bar codes, which only share that a carton contains product XYZ, EPCs can identify one box of product XYZ from another box of product XYZ.
"This is possible because EPCs are powered by radio frequency identification or RFID. EPCs do not track customers. ... EPCs assist retailers in more closely monitoring where products are as they move from manufacturers to warehouses to a store's backroom.
"This helps us do a better job of having the right products on the shelves when you come to buy them."
Source: www.walmart.com
Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
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Editorial: Colombian and Peruvian Elections Prove Stalin Was Right
by Stephen Lendman
June 7, 2006
Joe Stalin wasn't just an ordinary dictator, he was a very savvy one. He had to have been to have held on to power for over 30 years, succeed in outfoxing his rivals, and even be able to break the back of the vaunted Nazi Wehrmacht that turned the tide of the war in Europe and led to Hitler's demise. His political control at home and over his allied Warsaw Pact countries was best explained by the philosophy he reportedly once expressed: "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes."
That Stalinist wisdom and modus operandi surely applies to the elections just concluded in Colombia and Peru. Both nations have a majority of poor and indigenous people who want no part of a US imposed neoliberal "free market" way of doing things, and in a free and open election would never elect any candidate who did. So how come that's exactly what happened? On May 28, we're supposed to believe the Colombian people rejected a more moderate or democratic alternative and instead chose to reelect right wing hard-liner and close Bush ally Alvaro Uribe Velez who had to arrange for the constitution to be changed to allow him to run in the first place. And on June 4, lightning seemed to strike twice in one week as the people of Peru for some unexplained reason elected former disgraced president and economy-wrecker while he held office Alan Garcia who also happens to support the Washington Consensus and will dutifully surrender his nation's sovereignty to the Bush administration.
I hope readers of this web site don't buy any of this and are savvy enough to understand how smart Joe Stalin was. I'd also like to add my own strong view to what the former Soviet dictator may have said. It's not just who counts the votes that determines an election outcome, it's also who decides who's allowed to vote and who isn't. For many weeks before the Colombian and Peruvian elections, CIA, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), US Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Republican Institute (IRI) operatives were all over both countries setting in place the process needed to assure both their candidates won regardless of whether the majority of people wanted them. They clearly did not, and had they been allowed to vote and do it fairly would have defeated both Washington allied candidates who will do everything they can to support the interests of the US, its giant transnational corporations and their own elite and virtually nothing whatever to serve the needs of their own people.
So what may lie ahead in both countries as two oppressive regimes pursue their Washington-friendly policies and continue to harm the great majority in their own countries. Yesterday on the VHeadline.com web site, Alfredo Bremont wrote that Hugo Chavez "has every reason to be happy that Alan Garcia won in Peru." He went on to explain that "there is no nation on this planet that will succeed as long (as) it follows Washington D.C.'s dictum" as Colombia and Peru have done. Alfredo says they got what they have "chosen." My own view is those in charge of the electoral process, with lots of help from US experts, arranged for and got the outcome they wanted. This is nothing new as the US has a long history of staging "demonstration elections" (as Edward S. Herman brilliantly documented in his book by that title), particularly in Latin America.
But Alfredo and I see a similar future and not just in Colombia and Peru. The spirit and strength of Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution will one day spread throughout the region and eventually displace those alternatives that only serve wealth and power and do it at the expense of the people. The June 6 headline on a page 4 Wall Street Journal story that "In Peru Vote, Biggest Loser is Chavez" will one day prove embarrassingly wrong. But when today's WSJ gloat fades, you won't find that reported on its pages.
No system as corrupted as the US model that needs repression, imperial expansion and militarism to make it work can possibly survive. It's already in decline and will eventually crumble under its own weight. That's the fate of all houses made only of cards and not substance. In the case of Colombia and Peru, justice has only been delayed, not denied. A glorious, shinning day is ahead for all peoples in the Americas and beyond, and when it comes the spirit and legacy of Hugo Chavez and his glorious Bolivarian Revolution will have been vindicated.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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The things I do for my country
RI to Rumsfeld: Let Nations Decide How to Fight Terrorism
The Associated Press
Wednesday 07 June 2006
Jakarta - Indonesia warned US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday that Washington risked triggering a backlash if it tried to force its approach to fighting terrorism on the rest of the world.
Rumsfeld, wrapping up a three nation tour of the region, held talks with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono and other senior government officials.
Topics discussed included improved ties between the two nations' militaries, security in the Malacca Strait and ways to boost cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
Juwono said he told Rumsfeld that, "as the largest Muslim country, we are very aware of the perception ... that the United states is overbearing," and advised against trying to force its tough anti-terror approach on other nations.
"It's best that you leave the main responsibility of anti-terrorist measures to the local government in question and not to be overly insistent about immediate results arriving from your perception of terrorists," he said at a joint news conference.
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BACK TO THE BUNKER: Bush Reich Going Into Hiding on June 19, Practice Run for WHAT?
By William M. Arkin
Washington Post
June 4, 2006; Page B01
On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.
But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.
After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington.
Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible.
Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless.
That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival.
Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.
At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.
Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.
On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.
In the aftermath, the federal government was told to reinvigorate its continuity efforts. Bush approved lines of succession for civil agencies. Cabinet departments and agencies were assigned specific emergency responsibilities. FEMA issued new preparedness guidelines and oversaw training. A National Capital Region continuity working group established in 1999, comprising six White House groups, 15 departments and 61 agencies, met to coordinate.
But all the frenetic activity did not produce a government prepared for the worst. A year after 9/11, and almost three years after the deadline set in Clinton's 1998 directive, the Government Accounting Office evaluated 38 agencies and found that not one had addressed all the issues it had been ordered to. A 2004 GAO audit of 34 government continuity-of-operations plans found total confusion on the question of essential functions. One unnamed organization listed 399 such functions. A department included providing "speeches and articles for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary" among its essential duties, while neglecting many of its central programs.
The confusion and absurdity have continued, according to documents I've collected over the past few years. In June 2004, FEMA told federal agencies that essential services in a catastrophe would include not only such obvious ones as electric power generation and disaster relief but also patent and trademark processing, student aid and passport processing. A month earlier, FEMA had told states and local communities that library services should be counted as essential along with fire protection and law enforcement.
None of this can be heartening to Americans who want to believe that in a crisis, their government can distinguish between what is truly essential and what isn't -- and provide it.
Just two years ago, an exercise called Forward Challenge '04 pointed up the danger of making everyone and everything essential: Barely an hour after agencies were due to arrive at their relocation sites, the Office of Management and Budget asked the reconstituted government to identify emergency funding requirements.
As one after-action report for the exercise later put it in a classic case of understatement: "It was not clear . . . whether this would be a realistic request at that stage of an emergency."
This year's exercise, Forward Challenge '06, will be the third major interagency continuity exercise since 9/11. Larger than Forward Challenge '04 and the Pinnacle exercise held last year, it requires 31 departments and agencies (including FEMA) to relocate. Fifty to 60 are expected to take part.
According to government sources, the exercise will test the newly created continuity of government alert conditions -- called COGCONs -- that emulate the DEFCONs of the national security community. Forward Challenge will begin with a series of alerts via BlackBerry and pager to key officials. It will test COGCON 1, the highest level of preparedness, in which each department and agency is required to have at least one person in its chain of command and sufficient staffing at alternate operating facilities to perform essential functions.
Though key White House officials and military leadership would be relocated via the Pentagon's Joint Emergency Evacuation Program (JEEP), the civilians are on their own to make it to their designated evacuation points.
But fear not: Each organization's COOP, or continuity of operations plan, details the best routes to the emergency locations. The plans even spell out what evacuees should take with them (recommended items: a combination lock, a flashlight, two towels and a small box of washing powder).
Can such an exercise, announced well in advance, hope to re-create any of the tensions and fears of a real crisis? How do you simulate the experience of driving through blazing, radiated, panic-stricken streets to emergency bunker sites miles away?
As the Energy Department stated in its review of Forward Challenge '04, "a method needs to be devised to realistically test the ability of . . . federal offices to relocate to their COOP sites using a scenario that simulates . . . the monumental challenges that would be involved in evacuating the city."
With its new plans and procedures, Washington may think it has thought of everything to save itself. Forward Challenge will no doubt be deemed a success, and officials will pronounce the continuity-of-government project sound. There will be lessons to be learned that will justify more millions of dollars and more work in the infinite effort to guarantee order out of chaos.
But the main defect -- a bunker mentality that considers too many people and too many jobs "essential" -- will remain unchallenged.
warkin@igc.org
William M. Arkin writes the Early Warning blog for washingtonpost.com and is the author of "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World" (Steerforth Press).
Comment: Well, maybe they know something they aren't telling?
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Anti-Gay Amendment Reveals President Bush's Is Naked
Steve Sabludowsky
6/7/2006
What does it tell you when the President Bush pulls a surprise with his Marriage Protection Amendment barring same-sex marriages and he can't muster the votes in the U.S. Senate. Looks like its time to clean his government once again for such a lame brain trick and perhaps he should send Karl Rove to Siberia to check on the Arctic melting.
The invincible armor once worn by President Bush is gone. He is politically naked and it shows.
Should the bill die a natural death, it would not mean that Americans do not agree with President Bush about the value of traditional marriages and their discomfort with gay marriages. The lack of ground swell support on the issue is that Americans feel duped by President Bush on Iraq, that they see him as gay bashing for political purposes, they don't like amending the Constitution and finally, they have real business upon which they want the President, Congress and America to focus.
Real business such as energy prices, Iran, terror, global warming and preparing for hurricane season. Many of the issues relate to hurricane preparedness require federal remedies and Americans feel that Bush is really super "bush league" in dealing with the tragedies.
Case in point. New Orleans is still waiting for a real signal and push from the President about additional funding for housing and infrastructure. The longer they wait, the more difficult it will be to attract former residents. This summer is a window of opportunity for many to decide whether to repopulate the City or keep their families in communities and schools elsewhere.
These former residents and many of them are middle class citizens who would very easily vote Republicans during the upcoming mid-term election want solutions to the most basic problems of their lives-shelter and jobs. Senator Frist has pointed out that Republicans have a good record of accomplishments to run on.
The Katrina and Iraq debacles are not in that number. Americans might be stupid sometimes, but in the case of playing around with very "hot button" social issues right in time of elections might be great morals but it smacks of political chicanery and even Americans who have been duped by this Administration are not going to fall for the emotional flagellation right now.
Nope, they want real answers to real questions. They want food, shelter, protection and certainty. Now, if he found bin Laden-dead or alive, now we might be talking, but until then, just fix our problems as mortals , don't play God. Your right flank might love you now Mr. President, but, the rest of us see you have no clothing.
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U.S. puts patrols at Canadian border on 'high alert'
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:55:10 EDT
CBC News
The United States is beefing up traffic checks along the Canada-U.S. border following the arrests of 17 Canadians accused of plotting to bomb targets in Ontario.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said Monday that patrol stations, particularly those along the border with Ontario, are on high alert.
Agents deployed along the 6,400-kilometre border will work overtime checking traffic coming into the U.S. from Canada, he said.
Other agents will be moved to crossings around southern Ontario, he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Kristi Clemens said traffic entering the U.S. through 89 ports of entry will undergo tougher procedures.
The agency has added "enforcement capabilities," she said, but didn't provide any further details.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day spoke with U.S. Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff on Saturday, said a representative for Day, who didn't reveal what the two spoke about.
Day's office wouldn't comment on the increased security at the border.
About 1,000 border patrol agents work along the U.S.-Canada border, which is often called the world's longest undefended border.
Comment: Gosh, now the US will need to "secure" its southern and northern border...
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Senators Seek Answers in Probe of Reporter
The Associated Press
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - In a new jab at the Bush administration over its use of executive power, the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding that the Justice Department explain the agency's investigations of journalists who publish classified information.
Specifically, Republicans and Democrats want to know more about the FBI's effort to obtain a half-century's worth of papers kept by columnist Jack Anderson - a member of President Nixon's "enemies list" - who died in December at 83.
Matthew Friedrich, the Justice Department's criminal division chief of staff, is facing a skeptical panel at a hearing Tuesday.
Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has chafed for months over President Bush's secretive domestic wiretapping and phonetapping programs, and maintained that national security may not justify such uses of executive power. He personally told President Bush earlier this year that "the president doesn't have a blank check."
Now, with the administration considering prosecuting journalists who publish classified information and refuse to reveal their sources, Specter wants the full story of the Anderson search.
Scheduled to testify Tuesday were Friedrich, Anderson's son Kevin and Mark Feldstein, a former investigative reporter who is writing a book about Anderson.
Feldstein says two FBI agents showed up at his home March 3 seeking the roughly 200 boxes of Anderson's papers that the family had granted him access for the book. The agents, Feldstein has said, cited national security concerns.
Members of the Judiciary Committee don't buy the explanation.
"I fail to see what possible national security interest is served by the FBI rummaging through Mr. Anderson's files many years after he published articles about these matters," ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in prepared remarks.
The FBI has said that if the papers contain classified information, they belong to the government.
The FBI had long sought Anderson's papers after he published stories exposing the Keating Five, a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and details of the Iran-Contra affair.
Anderson's son said the FBI contacted his mother shortly after his father's funeral, expressing interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who have been charged with disclosing classified information.
In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive - which had yet to be catalogued - any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified.
The family refused.
The younger Anderson's account is similar to that of Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer, who said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March.
"They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family had not yet formally signed them over.
FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, said in an interview that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public. "It has been determined that, among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents containing classified information," Kolko said, declining to say how the FBI knows.
The documents contain information about sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies, he said.
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Nearly 600 Iraqi prisoners released
By PATRICK QUINN
Associated Press
7 June 06
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki released nearly 600 detainees Wednesday, making good on a pledge intended to ease feuding between Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
The detainees were the first of 2,000 prisoners whom al-Maliki promised would be freed from Iraq's most notorious prisons in an apparent effort to ease anger among minority Sunnis over allegations of arbitrary detentions and mistreatment of prisoners.
Sectarian tensions surged with Monday's abductions of 50 people in downtown Baghdad by gunmen wearing police uniforms and the shooting deaths of 21 Shiites north of the capital, including students pulled from their minivans.
Police said Wednesday that 15 of the kidnapped people had been released, some with signs of torture, but provided no details on their identities.
Al-Maliki, a Shiite who took office two weeks ago, has made security and reconciliation among Sunnis and Shiites a priority of his government. He has stressed, however that the detainee release plan excludes loyalists of ousted leader Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated Baath Party, as well as "terrorists whose hands are stained with the blood of the Iraqi people."
The government said 2,000 detainees whose cases have been reviewed will be released in the coming days in batches of about 500. The first 594 were released Wednesday from U.S.- and Iraqi-run prisons around Iraq, including
Abu Ghraib.
Released inmates dropped off at a bus station in Baghdad kissed the ground and sat down and cheered. One man used crutches for support.
"I was arrested from my home on Dec. 19, 2004, so I was accused of kidnapping people working for Iraqna mobile company," said one released prisoner, Mohammed Jassim.
Al-Maliki said Tuesday 2,500 would be released, but changed that number to 2,000 Wednesday.
Iraqi officials have said there is an agreement to release up to 14,000 detainees once their cases have been reviewed. A U.N. report last month said there were 28,700 detainees in Iraq.
Omar al-Jubori, a member of the Iraq Islamic Party, the largest Sunni Arab group in the governing coalition, said the agreement came after negotiations with U.S. Embassy and military officials, as well as street protests.
The releases will "give happiness and hope to every detainee and every oppressed person in this country," al-Jubori said.
Italy's foreign minister, meanwhile, said Italy will not withdraw all its troops from Iraq until the end of the year, sticking to a timeline set by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi even after the election of a new center-left government.
But Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, who was in Baghdad to discuss the plans with Iraqi leaders, said Italy would begin reducing the number of Italian troops in Iraq this month.
The announcement came two days after an attack on an Italian military convoy in southern Iraq killed a soldier and wounded four others. Premier Romano Prodi said Tuesday that the attack would not hasten Italy's withdrawal from the country.
D'Alema's announcement was the first indication by the new government of the timing of the complete pullout of Italy's 2,700 troops from Iraq - the fourth-largest foreign contingent after the United States, Britain and
South Korea.
Italy follows Spain, Bulgaria and other U.S. allies that have either withdrawn or reduced their troops in Iraq. Of the 150,000 foreign troops in Iraq, 130,000 are U.S. soldiers.
Al-Maliki has announced he wants to take over security from U.S.-led forces within 18 months, starting with four southern provinces by the end of the year. The plan would put American and international forces in a supervisory role, part of an exit strategy that will eventually allow the troops to go home.
But it remains doubtful whether al-Maliki's national unity government will be able to end Iraq's chaos.
On Wednesday, four police officers were killed in a shootout with gunmen in cars in Baghdad's upscale al-Mansour district. Five minutes later, a roadside bomb detonated in the same place, injuring a police officer.
In northern Kirkuk, gunmen shot and killed a Sunni Arab cleric and member of the local Association of Muslim Clerics.
Just before dawn, three rockets landed on a house, killing a man and wounding his two brothers in Baghdad. The men had been sleeping on their roof in an effort to say cool in temperatures hovering around 116 degrees. It was unclear who the target was.
A roadside bomb killed two police officers and wounded two others near a passport office in eastern Baghdad, police 1st. Lt. Ahmed Muhammad Ali said.
Al-Maliki has blamed a desire by insurgents to cripple the political process for the spike in violence since he took office just over two weeks ago.
The Iraqi Islamic Party blamed the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry for Monday's kidnappings. The ministry, which oversees police, denied its forces were behind the abduction.
Suspicion has fallen on militias, which are believed to have infiltrated police forces and have killed hundreds in sectarian violence, personal vendettas and kidnappings for ransom.
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Scientist Wins Suit Against Gov For Invasion of Privacy: Awarded over One Million Media Ordered to Pay Up or Go to Jail for Supporting Gov Line and Failing to Investigate
By ADAM LIPTAK
NY Times
June 3, 2006
Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, yesterday settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government for $1,645,000.
Five news organizations are paying almost half that sum to avoid contempt sanctions against their reporters.
In the suit, Dr. Lee said the government had violated privacy laws by telling reporters about his employment history, finances, travels and polygraph tests. The settlement followed seven months of unusual negotiations among Dr. Lee, the government and lawyers for the news organizations.
The five reporters were not defendants, but had been held in contempt of court for refusing to testify and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day for refusing to disclose the identities of their confidential sources.
The news organizations - ABC News, part of the Walt Disney Company; The Associated Press; The Los Angeles Times, part of the Tribune Company; The New York Times; and The Washington Post - agreed to contribute $750,000 to the settlement.
Specialists in media law said such a payment by news organizations to avoid a contempt sanction was almost certainly unprecedented. Some called it troubling.
In a joint statement, the five organizations said they made the payment reluctantly.
"We did so," they explained, "to protect our confidential sources, to protect our journalists from further sanction and possible imprisonment and to protect our news organizations from potential exposure."
A senior vice president of ABC, Henry S. Hoberman, said the decision to settle was made after a long, hard legal fight.
"The journalists found themselves between a rock and a hard place after years of seeking relief from the courts and finding none," Mr. Hoberman said. "Given the absence of a federal shield law and the consistently adverse rulings from the federal courts in this case, the only way the journalists could keep their bond with their sources and avoid further sanctions, which might include jail time, was to contribute to a settlement between the government and Wen Ho Lee that would end the case."
Federal courts have been increasingly hostile in recent years to assertions by journalists that they are legally entitled to protect their confidential sources. Last year, Judith Miller, who was a reporter for The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative.
Dr. Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, brought his case against the government in 1999, the year federal investigators accused him of giving nuclear secrets to China.
Dr. Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data, and he received an apology from the judge in the case.
A lawyer for Dr. Lee, Brian A. Sun, said the settlement furthered two goals.
"We wanted to send a message to the government that leaking information protected by law is not justified, even if they think it's politically expedient to do so," Mr. Sun said. "And the fact that the journalists contributed to the settlement recognizes the role they played in the series of unfortunate events that surrounded Dr. Lee's case."
The settlement included an unusual condition, Mr. Sun said.
"The government didn't want any of the money going into his pocket," Mr. Sun said of Dr. Lee.
In the end, Dr. Lee agreed to apply the government's payment to lawyers' fees, litigation costs and taxes. The money from the news organizations was unrestricted.
The fines against the reporters - Robert Drogin of The Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of The A.P., Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, James Risen of The New York Times and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now of ABC News - were suspended while they appealed.
The judge in the case, Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court in Washington, vacated the contempt sanctions as part of the settlement. The settlement also moots a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
Though Mr. Thomas covered Dr. Lee for CNN, part of Time Warner, it did not participate in the settlement.
"CNN paid over $1 million toward Pierre's defense in this matter," a spokeswoman, Laurie Goldberg, said. "We parted ways because we had a philosophical disagreement over whether it was appropriate to pay money to Wen Ho Lee or anyone else to get out from under a subpoena."
The five other organizations made roughly similar contributions to the settlement, lawyers in the case said.
The government has settled similar privacy suits in the past. In 2003, it paid Linda R. Tripp, a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, $595,000 to settle a suit that accused it of leaking employment information about her.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she viewed the settlement in Dr. Lee's case with mixed emotions.
"It's a huge disappointment, and it's certainly not an ideal resolution," Ms. Dalglish said. "But it's probably as good as we could have expected under the circumstances."
The New York Times has long maintained that it will not settle libel suits in the United States for money. Its lawyers said the payment to Dr. Lee did not violate the principles behind that policy.
"It's apples and oranges," George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said. "That principle remains. In libel suits, people aren't sent to jail."
The Times covered the charges against Dr. Lee aggressively. But in September 2000, it published a lengthy note "from the editors" saying that despite "careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking," there were "some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."
The note said The Times should have pushed harder and sooner "to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee" and to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions behind the case.
In their statement yesterday, the news organizations said the settlement was not connected to their coverage of the case against Dr. Lee.
"The journalism in this case - which was not challenged in Lee's lawsuit - reported on a matter of great public interest," the statement said. "And the public could not have been informed about the issues without the information we were able to obtain only from confidential sources."
Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said she found the news organizations' decision to participate in the settlement "profoundly disturbing."
"These are very strange times in which we are living," Professor Kirtley said, "and it does appear that sometimes decisions have to be made that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But to make a payment in settlement in this context strikes me as an admission that the media are acting in concert with the government."
Ms. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee disagreed.
"I view it," she said, "purely as, 'What can we do to get the least damaging result?' "
Mr. Freeman, the lawyer for The Times, also rejected Professor Kirtley's characterization.
"We acted in the best interests of our reporters and our news organizations to protect our sources and protect our journalists," he said. "We were not acting in concert with anyone. The three parties managed to resolve the matter."
News media lawyers said they hoped that the settlement would help prompt a change in federal law. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection, at least in the context of grand jury subpoenas.
Though most states have so-called shield laws that protect journalists' confidential sources, those laws are usually irrelevant in cases brought in federal court.
The settlement in Dr. Lee's case, Professor Kirtley said, "certainly underscores the need for meaningful journalists' shield laws, now."
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Baghdad's mortuary inundated with 6,000 corpses this year
By Jerome Taylor
07 June 2006
The bodies of 6,000 people, many of whom died violently, have been brought to Baghdad's main mortuary this year, officials from Iraq's health ministry said.
In May alone one of the bloodiest months in the city so far this year 1,400 bodies were received by the mortuary.
According to health ministry officials who spoke anonymously to the BBC, the vast majority of victims brought to the morgue were the victims of sectarian killings, which have increased dramatically since the bombing of a Shia shrine earlier in the year.
Yesterday's statistics came just hours after police made the gruesome discovery of nine severed heads which had been stuffed into a cardboard box in a volatile area north of Baghdad.
Police in Baquba said they found the heads in the al-Hadid district, just three days after suspected sectarian attackers beheaded seven cousins from one family and a Sunni Arab imam in the same region.
Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, is a religiously mixed province that has seen large numbers of inhabitants flee the area because of killings and assassinations based solely on ethnicity.
Meanwhile, Iraq's new Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, announced yesterday that he would release 2,500 prisoners, most of them Sunni Arabs, in a move aimed at winning over more Sunnis and undermining support for the insurgency. "Those who will be released will be people who are not Saddam Hussein loyalists or terrorists or anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands," said Mr Maliki.
Comment: And that's just Baghdad.
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Facing Waves of Litigation, Invoking Secrets Privilege Becomes a More Popular Legal Tactic by Illegal U.S. Gov
By SCOTT SHANE
NY Times
June 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, June 3 - Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handling of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privilege.
In recent weeks alone, officials have used the privilege to win the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a German man who was abducted and held in Afghanistan for five months and to ask the courts to throw out three legal challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.
But civil liberties groups and some scholars say the privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's accusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era.
The privilege has been asserted by the Justice Department more frequently under President Bush than under any of his predecessors - in 19 cases, the same number as during the entire eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder, according to a count by William G. Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso.
While the privilege, defined by a 1953 Supreme Court ruling, was once used to shield sensitive documents or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception, Mr. Weaver and other legal specialists say.
"This is a very powerful weapon for the executive branch," said Mr. Weaver, who has a law degree and is a co-author of one of the few scholarly articles examining the privilege. "Once it's asserted, in almost every instance it stops the case cold."
Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University who is studying the recent use of the privilege, said the administration's legal strategy "raises profound legal and policy questions that will be the subject of intense debate for the foreseeable future."
Some members of Congress also have doubts about the way the privilege has been used. A bill approved by the House Government Reform Committee would limit its use in blocking whistle-blowers' lawsuits.
"If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who proposed the measure and has campaigned against excessive government secrecy.
Yet courts have almost always deferred to the secrecy claims; Mr. Weaver said he believed that the last unsuccessful assertion of the privilege was in 1993. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "It's a sign of how potent the national security mantra has become."
Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has been used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches; to stop a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Sterling, a Farsi-speaking, African-American officer at the Central Intelligence Agency; and to derail a patent claim involving a coupler for fiber-optic cable, evidently to guard technical details of government eavesdropping.
Such cases can make for oddities. Mark S. Zaid, who has represented Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Sterling and other clients in privilege cases, said he had seen his legal briefs classified by the government and had been barred from contacting a client because his phone line was not secure.
"In most state secrets cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers don't know what the alleged secrets are," Mr. Zaid said.
More recently the privilege has been wielded against lawsuits challenging broader policies, including the three lawsuits attacking the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program - one against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and two against the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
In a filing in the New York case, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, wrote that allowing the case to proceed would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" because it "would enable adversaries of the United States to avoid detection." Mr. Negroponte said he was providing more detail in classified filings.
Those cases are still pending. Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.
One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. The other, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Kuwaiti origin, was seized in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan, where he has said he was beaten and injected with drugs before being released in Albania.
The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Mr. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing. A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on May 18, accepting the government's secrets claim.
One frustration of the plaintiffs in such cases is that so much information about the ostensible state secrets is already public. Mr. Arar's case has been examined in months of public hearings by a Canadian government commission, and Mr. Masri's story has been confirmed by American and German officials and blamed on a mix-up of similar names. The N.S.A. program has been described and defended in numerous public statements by Mr. Bush and other top officials and in a 42-page Justice Department legal analysis.
In the A.C.L.U. lawsuit charging that the security agency's eavesdropping is illegal, Ann Beeson, the group's associate legal director, acknowledged that some facts might need to remain secret. "But you don't need those facts to hear this case," she said. "All the facts needed to try this case are already public."
Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said he could not discuss any specific case. But he said the state secrets privilege "is well-established in federal law and has been asserted many times in our nation's history to protect our nation's secrets."
Other defenders of the administration's increasing use of the privilege say it merely reflects proliferating lawsuits.
In all of the N.S.A. cases, for instance, "it's the same secret they're trying to protect," said H. Bryan Cunningham, a Denver lawyer who served as a legal adviser to the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. Mr. Cunningham said that under well-established precedent, judges must defer to the executive branch in deciding what secrets must be protected.
But critics of the use of the privilege point out that officials sometimes exaggerate the sensitivities at risk. In fact, documents from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.
An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.
"The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false," Mr. Brown said in an interview. "It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there's very little chance to straighten it out."
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Dancing Queens of the Stone Age
Abbas extends ultimatum; Gaza fighting intensifies
Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies
By Avi Issacharoff
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas yesterday extended his ultimatum to Hamas, giving it until the weekend to agree to the so-called Prisoners' Document.
Abbas had originally said that he would call a referendum on the document - a blueprint for a national unity government drafted by Palestinians jailed in Israel - if Hamas did not accept it by today. Such a referendum could be viewed as a vote of confidence in the two-month-old Hamas government.
Representatives of Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party left for Yemen yesterday to continue negotiations with the assistance of Yemeni President Abdullah Salah. The Hamas delegation was led by Khaled Meshal, who heads the organization's overseas wing.
Meanwhile, a new poll released yesterday shows that 77 percent of Palestinians support the document, which states that the Palestinian people "desires the liberation of its lands ... including the right to establish an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital on all the territories occupied in 1967."
The poll, conducted by Birzeit University in Ramallah, also indicated a dramatic drop in support for Hamas: 37 percent of respondents said they would vote for Hamas if parliamentary elections were held today, compared to 50 percent in April. Some 37 percent said they would vote Fatah.
Abbas agreed to extend his ultimatum during a meeting of the PLO's executive committee in Ramallah yesterday. The committee approved both the extension and his proposal for a referendum.
"Before the end of the week, President Abbas will hold a news conference to announce the holding of the referendum and the beginning of the process for carrying it out," Yasser Abed Rabbo, a PLO Executive Committee official close to Abbas, said.
On Monday night, according to a participant in that night's negotiations with Hamas, Abbas had declared that efforts to get Hamas to support the document had failed, and that he would announce a referendum on the issue today. But Abed Rabbo said that Arab leaders, including Salah, and representatives of the Palestinian prisoners had urged Abbas to grant the extension.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, however, said yesterday the gaps between Abbas and Hamas on the document are too great to be settled in two days. He said negotiations must continue without any time constraints, Israel Radio reported.
Abbas has said repeatedly he will not accept any changes to the plan, which was produced by prisoners from both Fatah and Hamas. But Hamas insists various changes be made. "The approach is to treat this document as a sacred document, and that is something we don't accept," said the Hamas spokesman.
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"Arab Spring" Fades in the Face of Authoritarian Regimes
By Pierre Prier
Le Figaro
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Leaders are taking back control at the risk of finding themselves alone with the Islamists.
Egyptian opposition figure Mohammed al-Charqaoui was kidnapped in broad daylight by the Cairo police on May 25. According to his lawyer, who was able to see him, "his lips were swollen and bloody, his eyes practically shut and you could see shoeprints on his skin." In a written message, al-Charqaoui relates that he was beaten for over three hours and sodomized with a cardboard tube. He was still in detention yesterday, as were certain other recently arrested militants.
Syrian Michel Kilo is also in prison. A historic opponent to Hafez el-Assad, then to his son Bachar, he was authorized to criticize the regime. That's all over. This 57-year-old political scientist was arrested in his home at dawn on May 14. Accused among other things of "defaming the Head of State," he risks life imprisonment. As do dozens of other intellectuals arrested in recent weeks.
Did the "Arab spring" only last a season? Three years ago, just before the Iraq offensive, George Bush announced his ambition to "spread democratic values" to the Middle East. A new regime in Baghdad would serve as a "powerful example of freedom for the other nations in the region." At first, American pressures falling under the generic heading "Greater Middle East" contributed just about everywhere to democratic advances: the first presidential election with several candidates in Egypt, freedom of speech for the Syrian opposition. "Before, when I was called in by the secret services, I was offered a couple of slaps as I left. Now, I'm offered a cup of coffee," one of them said only a few months ago. In the Gulf, women obtained the right to vote in Kuwait, among other things, and even Saudi women should be able to vote in the next partial municipal elections, inaugurated in 2005.
But three years after Bush's announcement, the dynamism seems to be arrested. Iraq is courting chaos and regimes are hardening up. Egypt has reinstated a state of emergency first established in 1981. Opposition leader Ayman Nour, who came in second place behind Hosni Mubarak in the September presidential election, has been condemned to five years in prison for "falsification of a file." He is also ineligible [as a candidate] for six supplementary years, which would prohibit him from running in 2011. Syria snaps up writers and re-establishes itself in Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, the palace has specified that a constitutional monarchy is not on the program.
Contradictory Message From the United States
Has the Greater Middle east disappeared in the Iraqi quagmire? Some still want to believe in it. "There's been a slowdown in American pressure on governments for temporary reasons: the war in Iraq, Iran and Palestinian Hamas's victory, but they still think loosening is necessary," assures a high ranking Arab diplomat.
The United States has recently sent contradictory messages to their allies. A State Department spokesperson demanded Ayman Nour's liberation in May and talked about "a reversal for the Egyptian people's democratic aspirations." But, at the same time, Bush received Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and probable dynastic successor.
The American plan has already discovered its limits. Because democratization doesn't go in the right direction? Everywhere, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, timid electoral openings have given victory to movements that assert their links to Islam. To the United States' great displeasure, believes researcher Olivier Roy.* "There's no democracy without political legitimacy and no political legitimacy without taking into account Arab nationalism and Islamism. Now, the United States distrusts Arab nationalism and Islamism.
Authoritarian regimes are betting on a reduction in American and European pressures and play up to the slogan, "It's Islamism or Us." During the World Economic Forum at Sharm el-Sheikh on May 20, Hosni Mubarak claimed he had obtained carte blanche from Condoleezza Rice for the next twenty years: "She understood that democracy in Arab countries takes a generation," he declared to the Egyptian press.
It's not the Islamization of society that bothers these regimes. Most, including Baathist Syria most recently, allow religious institutions to control society in exchange for their benediction. It's only when the Islamists make a show of organizing into parties that they are repressed, just like "secular" political oppositions. For analyst Bassma Kodmani, director of the Arab Reform Initiative, which brings together "liberal" Arab and western study centers, political opening-up is the only solution to settling the limits between religion, politics, and society.
She believes as well that authorizing political parties would also allow the organization of left and liberal currents, counterweights to the Islamists that are growing in power in Arab societies. Thus, in Egypt, the "Kefaya" ("Enough") network is more and more accompanying the struggle of peasants despoiled by big landowners. One of the many signs that political effervescence in the region is not about to die down.
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Gunmen in Police Uniform Abduct 56 in Iraq
By Nelson Hernandez and Salih Saif Aldin
The Washington Post
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Baghdad - "Turn back," a friend told Haji Abu Shamaa as he walked Monday morning toward his money-changing shop in the Karkh neighborhood of central Baghdad, a mile north of the heavily guarded Green Zone. "The Interior Ministry police are rounding up people."
But Shamaa walked on, right into a swift, coordinated operation unfolding within sight of Iraq's Ministry of Justice. Gunmen in police uniforms and ski masks had cordoned off the street and were swiftly shoving captives, four or five at a time, into a dozen waiting pickup trucks. Fifteen minutes later, the trucks were gone, and so were 56 people.
The roundup displayed all the signs of an unrelenting kidnapping epidemic in Baghdad. Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, more than 400 foreigners have been abducted in Iraq, but thousands more Iraqis have been snatched from the streets, often by people wearing knockoff police uniforms that are easily purchased at local markets.
Many people, like Shamaa's friend, believe the kidnappers are actually police. Usually the hostages are held for ransom. Sometimes they are killed because of their faith or ethnicity.
The fate of the 56 people was unknown Monday night. But the scale and audacity of the operation were unusual even by the capital's lawless standards.
The gunmen seized workers from several bus companies that offer transport to Syria and Jordan, witnesses and police said. Others of those taken were passengers aboard the buses: Syrian businessmen going home, a handful of Palestinians, Iraqis. Many Iraqis are leaving their own country precisely because it is the sort of place where a trip to the bus stop can end with being led away at gunpoint.
Shamaa said he was intent on returning to his office, to rejoin his son, Alaa, and thought the police wouldn't arrest him - he hadn't done anything wrong, he reasoned. Then he saw a dozen pickup trucks, two of them with machine guns mounted in their beds, and none with any license plates.
A man in a camouflage police uniform and a ski mask - an article commonly worn by police in Baghdad- stopped Shamaa, saying he would shoot him if he didn't turn back.
"I haven't done anything," Shamaa recounted explaining to him. "I just want to go to the bank to get some money, and I'll be gone."
The man let him pass. Shamaa went into the bank and watched the scene unfolding through the window. He said he saw gunmen entering the Mohammed Ugaili Transportation Co. across the street. He saw the owner, Jasim Ugaili, and his son being forced into one of the pickup trucks with the butts of rifles. Shamaa saw his own son, Alaa, with them, his hands tied behind his back.
Shamaa rushed outside to save his son. Another man with a rifle blocked his way.
"What, do you want to join him?" the man threatened. Shamaa turned back. And the trucks drove off.
Police Col. Adel Younis said guards at the Ministry of Justice shot at the kidnappers but couldn't stop them. Another witness, Hussein Ali, said he had seen a police car drive up to the scene, only to be driven off by gunfire and shouted warnings from the kidnappers that they were from the Interior Ministry's intelligence section.
Younis said the incident is under investigation. A police major who came on the scene after the attack said the men were not with the Interior Ministry, a witness said.
Raids like this one only increase popular mistrust of the police. Sunni Arabs often accuse the Interior Ministry police, dominated by Shiite Muslims, of conducting a terror campaign against them, or at least looking the other way as Shiite militias associated with political parties do so. But police say the attacks are carried out by criminals wearing police uniforms. At the same time, they counter that Iraq's major insurgent organizations are led by Sunnis and that a tough response is required.
Monday's kidnappings did not appear to be motivated by sectarian rivalry, a witness said. "Among the passengers were Syrian businessmen, about five or six of them," Hasan Falah said. "There were also some passengers from Diwaniyah" - a predominantly Shiite city south of Baghdad- "and other parts of Iraq. There was no question of Shiite or Sunni because it was a whole mixture."
That suggested that the people were simply taken for ransom, a lucrative business that has grown rapidly since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.
A group of Shiite students in a neighborhood of southern Baghdad, kidnapped in another roundup on Monday, did not have the option of paying their way out.
In Abu Dashir, a Shiite neighborhood south of Dora, the volatile southern section of Baghdad, gunmen posing as drivers lined up a set of minibuses as if to offer rides to central Baghdad, a police officer said. Fifteen students from Abu Dashir got aboard.
The drivers and their accomplices killed them - where the murders happened is unclear - and threw their bodies off the side of the Dora highway.
Abduction statistics are unreliable because many families do not report crimes, fearing the police as much as they do the kidnapping gangs.
But every so often, kidnappers are brought to justice. On Monday, an Iraqi court sentenced an Iraqi man to life imprisonment in connection with the killing of Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi-British aid worker kidnapped in 2004. It is believed to be Iraq's first trial of a suspect accused of the abduction or murder of a foreign-born civilian since the U.S.-led invasion.
Mustafa Salman, charged with aiding and abetting the abductors, received the sentence a few hours after his trial started, the Reuters news service reported. Two other defendants in the case were freed.
Hassan, originally from Ireland, married an Iraqi engineer and lived in Iraq for more than three decades before becoming an Iraqi citizen. At the time of her kidnapping in October 2004, she headed Iraqi operations for the CARE International charity. She was abducted on her way to work in Baghdad. She was presumed murdered about a month later, after her captors released video messages of her appealing for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq. Her body has not been found.
Also in Baghdad on Monday, the defense team in the trial of Saddam Hussein protested the arrest of four of its witnesses. Defense attorneys charged that some of them were beaten by Iraqi guards.
The chief judge said they were jailed on suspicion of perjury last week after testifying that they had seen the chief prosecutor offering money and unspecified fake documents in exchange for testimony. One of the witnesses also claimed that some of the 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail who were allegedly killed on Hussein's orders were still alive.
Comment: "...often by people wearing knockoff police uniforms that are easily purchased at local markets."
Huh! Can we please see a picture of these markets with stacks of police uniforms?
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Palestine: It's All Over
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
June 5, 2006
The first item I ever wrote about Palestinians was around 1973, when I was just starting a press column for a New York weekly called the Village Voice. It concerned a story in the New York Times about a "retaliatory" raid by the Israeli air force, after a couple of Al Fatah guerillas had fired on an IDF unit. I'm not sure whether there any fatalities. The planes flew north and dumped high explosive on a refugee camp in Lebanon, killing a dozen or so men, women and children.
I wrote a little commentary, noting the usual lack of moral disquiet in the Times' story about this lethal retaliation inflicted on innocent refugees. Dan Wolf, the Voice's editor, called me in and suggested I might want to reconsider. I think, that first time, the item got dropped. But Dan's unwonted act of censorship riled me and I started writing a fair amount about the lot of the Palestinians.
These were the days when Palestinians carried far less news value for editors than Furbish's lousewort, and no politician ever held that this beleagured plant didn't actually exist as a species, which is what Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister said of Palestinians.
Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the intrepid professor from Hebrew University.
It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then and at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic trends were established in '74 and '75, including settler organizations, mystical ideology, and the great financial support of the United States to Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the key decisions were taken, and from that time it's a straight line." Among these decisions, said Shahak, was "to keep the occupied territories of Palestine," a detailed development of much older designs consummated in 1967.
Gradually, through the 1980s, very often in the translations from the Hebrew language press that Shahak used to send, the contours of the Israeli plan emerged, like the keel and ribs and timbers of an old ship: a road system that would bypass Palestinian towns and villages and link the Jewish settlements and military posts; ever-expanding clusters of settlements; a master plan for control of the whole region's water.
It wasn't hard to get vivid descriptions of the increasingly intolerable conditions of life for Palestinians: the torture of prisoners, the barriers to the simplest trip, the harassment of farmers and school children, the house demolitions. Plenty of people came back from Israel and the territories with harrowing accounts, though few ever made the journey into a major newspaper or onto national tv.
And even in the testimonies that did get published here, what was missing was any acknowledgement of the long-term plan to wipe the record clean of all troublesome U.N. resolutions, crush Palestinian national aspirations, steal their land and water, cram them into ever smaller enclaves, ultimately balkanize them with the Wall, which was on the drawing board many years ago. Indeed to write about any sort of master plan was to incur further torrents of abuse for one's supposedly "paranoid" fantasies about Israel' bad faith, with much pious invocation of the "peace process".
But successive Israeli governments did have a long-term plan. No matter who was in power, the roads got built, the water stolen, the olive and fruit trees cut down (a million) the houses knocked over (12,000), the settlements imposed (300) the shameless protestations of good faith issued to the US press (beyond computation).
As the new millennium shambled forward, surely it became impossible to believe any Israeli claim to be bargaining, or even to wish to bargain in good faith. By now the "facts of the ground" in Israel and the territories were as sharply in focus as one of Dali's surrealist paintings.
In May of this year the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, comes to Washington and addresses a joint session of Congress in which he declares: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." In other words he doesn't recognize the right of Palestinians to even the wretched cantons currently envisaged in his "realignment". Why should Hamas believe a syllable of Olmert's poppycock? When Arafat and the PLO gave worrisome signs of being eager for an accommodation Israel's reply was to invade Lebanon.
In Olmert's "realignment plan the "Separation Barrier," now scheduled to be Israel's permanent "demographic border," annexes 10 per cent of the West Bank, while melding into Israel vast settlements and half a million settlers. The Palestinians lose their best agricultural land and the water. Israel's greater Jerusalem finishes off all possible viability for a viable, separate Palestinian state. This Palestinian mini-archipelago of cantons is shuttered to the east by Israel's security border in the Jordan Valley.
The press here, timid and ignorant, greets Olmert's "realignment" with tranquil respect. In the meantime a frightful historical tragedy is in its final chapters. With the connivance of what is sometimes laughably referred to as the "world community"--notably the US and EU, Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians into submission as the reward for having democratically elected the party of their choice. Whole communities are on the edge of starvation, cut off by Israel from food and medicines. The World Bank predicts a poverty rate of over 67 percent later this year. A UN Report issued in Geneva on May 30 says that four out of 10 Palestinians in the territories live under the official poverty line of less than $2.10 a day. The ILO estimates the jobless rate to be 40.7 percent of the Palestinian labor force.
The end of the story? I'd say the basic strategy is what it was in 1948: population transfer, to be achieved by making life so awful for Palestinians that most of them will depart, leaving a few bankrupt ghettoes behind as memorials to all those foolish hopes of a sovereign Palestinian state.
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Bodman says U.S. not worrying about oil disruption
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 02:37:01
WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said on Tuesday that he doesn't anticipate an oil supply disruption and U.S consumers wouldn't suffer undue hardships in the event Iran disrupts Gulf oil supplies.
Bodman told local reporters that the U.S. government would tap its strategic oil reserve in the event of oil disruption because the Bush administration has a plan "if push were to come to shove."
"We certainly can handle it for a while," he said. "There is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we have other approaches."
Bodman also said that he is convinced oil producers want "to keep the market well supplied. It's in their interest as well as the interest of consumers."
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Italian troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by end of 2006
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 16:29:49
BAGHDAD, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said here on Wednesday that his country would pull out its troops from Iraq by the end of this year.
"We think that the Italian mission in Iraq is moving toward its end and we will begin reducing the number of Italian troops in Iraq this month and during the coming months, military forces will return to their country," D'Alema told reporters at a news conference with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari.
"We think that by the end of this year our military mission will end in Iraq," he added.
For his part, Zebari said that the visit of the Italian foreign minister was also aimed at congratulating the new Iraqi government for its formal inauguration on May 20 as well as "holding talks on the withdrawal of the Italian troops, which we want to be a gradual pullout."
Italy has maintained about 3,000 troops in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, the fourth largest contingent after the U.S., Britain and South Korea.
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Thousands take to streets in Mogadishu
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:04:39 EDT
CBC News
Thousands rallied in the streets of Mogadishu on Tuesday in support of militia members of a group called the Islamic Courts Union.
The group, which has claimed control of the Somalian capital, is thought to have some sort of tie to al-Qaeda, and there are fears the country could fall under its sway.
Answering reporters' questions in Laredo, Texas, U.S. President George W. Bush said he was "concerned" about the situation.
"Obviously when there's instability anywhere in the world we're concerned. There is instability in Somalia," Bush said.
"[The] first concern, of course, would be to make sure that Somalia does not become an al-Qaeda safe haven, doesn't become a place from which terrorists plot and plan, so we're watching very carefully developments there," he said.
The Courts Union will have to negotiate with clan leaders who have been running the city for more than a decade.
The largest such clan drew 3,000 demonstrators calling for peace into the streets.
The Courts Union says the secular warlords are puppets of Washington who work for the CIA.
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With a little help from the outside
10:24 04/06/2006
By Gideon Levy
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
The laugh of fate: The state waging a broad international campaign for a boycott is simultaneously waging a parallel campaign, no less determined, against a boycott. A boycott that seriously harms the lives of millions of people is legitimate in its eyes because it is directed against those defined as its enemies, while a boycott that is liable to hurt its academic ivory tower is illegitimate in its eyes only because it is aimed against itself. This is a moral double standard. Why is the boycott campaign against the Palestinian Authority, including blocking essential economic aid and boycotting leaders elected in democratic and legal elections, a permissible measure in Israel's eyes and the boycott of its universities is forbidden?
Israel cannot claim the boycott weapon is illegitimate. It makes extensive use of this weapon itself, and its victims are suffering under severe conditions of deprivation, from Rafah to Jenin. In the past, Israel called upon the world to boycott Yasser Arafat, and now it is calling for a boycott of the Hamas government ? and via this government, all of the Palestinians in the territories. And Israel does not regard this as an ethical problem. Tens of thousands have not received their salaries for four months due to the boycott, but when there is a call to boycott Israeli universities, the boycott suddenly becomes an illegitimate weapon.
Those calling for a boycott of Israel are also tainted with a moral double standard. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education ?(NATFHE?) in Britain and the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario, which have both decided to boycott Israel, did not act similarly to protest their own countries' war crimes and occupations ? the British army in Iraq and the Canadian army in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the handful of human rights advocates and opponents of the occupation in Israel should thank these two organizations for the step they have taken, despite their flawed double standards.
It would have been preferable had the opponents of the occupation in Israel not needed the intervention of external groups to fight the occupation. It is not easy to call upon the world to boycott your own country. It would have been better had there been no need for Rachel Corrie, James Miller and Tom Hurndall, bold people of conscience who paid with their lives after standing in front of the destructive bulldozers in Rafah. These young foreigners did the dangerous and vital work that Israelis should have done.
The same is true for the few peace activists who still manage to roam the territories, to protest and offer assistance to the victims of the occupation in the framework of organizations like the International Solidarity Movement ?(ISM?) ? which Israel fights ? preventing its members from entering its borders. It would be better if Israelis mobilized to fight instead of them. But except for a few modest groups, there is no protest in Israel and no real mobilization. Thus, it only remains to hope for the world's help.
The world can help save Israel from itself in limited ways. In a situation in which the governments of the West effectively support the continuation of the occupation, even if they declare their opposition to it, this role moves to civil organizations. When a group of American attorneys, including Jews, calls for a boycott of the Caterpillar company, whose bulldozers razed complete neighborhoods in Khan Yunis and Rafah, it should be thanked for this. The same applies to the boycott of the universities: When an association of British university lecturers boycotts Israeli colleagues who are not prepared to at least declare their opposition to the occupation, we should appreciate it. Each group in its field, and perhaps this will someday also include tourism officials, business people, artists and athletes. If all these boycott Israel, perhaps Israelis will begin to understand, albeit the hard way, that there is a price to pay for the occupation ? a price in their pockets and in their status.
The occupation is not just the domain of the government, army and security organizations. Everything is tainted: institutions of justice and law, the physicians who remain silent while medical treatment is prevented in the territories, the teachers who do not protest against the closing of educational institutions and the prevention of free movement of their peers, the journalists who do not report, the writers and artists who remain mum, the architects and engineers who lend a hand to the occupation's enterprises ? the settlements and the fence, the barriers and bypass roads and also the university lecturers, who do nothing for their imprisoned colleagues in the territories, but conduct special study programs for the security forces. If all these boycotted the occupation, there would be no need for an international boycott.
The world sees a great and ongoing injustice. Should it remain silent? It is not, of course, the only injustice in the world. Nor is it the most terrible. But does this make it any less necessary to act against it?
It is easy to exempt ourselves from our moral responsibility and attribute, as usual, any criticism to anti-Semitism. There may indeed be some elements of anti-Semitism among those calling for the boycott. But also among them are groups and individuals, including quite a few Jews, for whom Israel is close to their hearts. They want a just Israel. They see an Israel that occupies and is clearly unjust, and they believe they should do something. We should thank them for this from the bottom of our hearts.
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Feel the Noiz
Europe colluded in CIA prisoner "spider's web"
By Jon Boyle
Reuters
7 June 06
PARIS - More than 20 states, mostly in Europe, colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA prisons and transfers of terrorism suspects, a European rights watchdog said in a report released on Wednesday.
Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations played a role in the network run by the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency and European governments were aware or participated in the operation, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe said.
"It is now clear -- although we are still far from having established the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities," Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty said.
"Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know," he said in the conclusions of the 65-page report released on the body's Web site.
While the report admits it has "no formal evidence" of secret CIA detention centers it said a number of states had clearly colluded with the system of CIA secret flights and secret transfers known as renditions.
Among the charges:-
* Poland and Romania ran secret detention centers
* Germany, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus and Azerbaijan were "staging points" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees
* Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Greece and Italy were "stopovers" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees
* Sweden, Bosnia, Britain, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, Germany and Turkey handed over suspects
* Cairo, Amman, Islamabad, Rabat, Kabul, Guantanamo Bay, Tashkent, Algiers and Baghdad served as detainee transfer/drop-off points
SLANDEROUS
Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said the report was false but many other governments have greeted the report with silence.
"These accusations are slanderous ... They are not based on any facts and that is all I know and all I have to say," Marcinkiewicz told reporters in parliament.
Despite the lack of "smoking gun" evidence, Marty said there were "a number of coherent and converging elements (that) indicated that secret detention centers have indeed existed and unlawful inter-state transfers have taken place in Europe."
Flight data provided in January and February from Eurocontrol helped uncover the web of flights, detention centers and stop-off points used in the U.S.-devised system.
Marty said 10 cases involving 17 individuals had come to light but many of the Council of Europe's 46 member states had been reluctant to provide information. More cases could follow.
EU investigators said last month they believed 30 to 50 people had been handed over to countries where they might face torture by the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
While the suspects' treatment "does not appear to reach the threshold for torture, it may well be considered as inhuman or degrading," Marty's report added.
The pan-European rights body can name and shame countries but cannot launch legal proceedings.
The allegations of CIA abuses, first made by newspapers and human rights groups late last year, fanned concerns in Europe about U.S. anti-terror tactics. But European governments are now under scrutiny due to mounting evidence they at best turned a blind eye to illegal activities.
Washington insists it acted with the full knowledge of the governments concerned, acknowledges the secret transfer of some terrorist suspects between countries and denies any wrongdoing.
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Secret CIA flights stopped in 2 countries: Poland, Romania
By JAN SLIVA
Associated Press
7 June 06
PARIS - The head of an investigation into alleged
CIA secret prisons in Europe said Wednesday that evidence suggests planes carrying terror suspects stopped in Romania and Poland and likely dropped off detainees there.
Swiss Sen. Dick Marty's final report, however, offered no clear, direct proof that CIA detention centers were set up in Europe - an allegation made by a human rights group last year.
Marty said Romania was part of what he called a "renditions circuit" and was used as a stopover by CIA-linked planes carrying terror suspects. He also said an airport in Poland was likely used as a detainee drop-off point, and accused a total of 14 European countries, including Britain, Italy and Germany, of violating human rights in connection with CIA activities.
"We believe we are in a position to state that successive CIA rendition operations have taken place in the course of the same, single flight circuit," Marty said in a report commissioned by the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights watchdog.
The report is addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states and will likely be used by the group to put pressure on the countries implicated in it to investigate the allegations.
The report relied mostly on flight logs provided by the
European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, witness statements gathered from people who said they had been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents, and judicial and parliamentary inquiries in various countries.
In his report, Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a "detainee transfer/drop-off point" category, together with eight airports outside Europe.
Marty analyzed a flight pattern of a plane with tail number N313P. He said the plane arrived in Timisoara from Kabul,
Afghanistan, on the night of Jan. 25, 2004, after having transported Khaled El-Masri, a German who said he had been abducted by foreign intelligence agents in Macedonia, to the Afghan capital. El-Masri claims he was imprisoned for five months and tortured there.
Marty said the plane with the crew that accompanied El-Masri stayed in Timisoara for 72 minutes before leaving for Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean Sea.
"Having eliminated other explanations - including that of a simple logistics flight - the most likely hypothesis of the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania," Marty said in the report without elaborating.
Marty said that based on the information at his disposal, he deduced the Szymany airport in northeastern Poland was used for a rendition flight in September 2003.
Neither country offered immediate comment, but both have denied involvement in the past.
Marty's investigation runs parallel to one by the European Parliament, which has said that data from Eurocontrol shows there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
But officials said the data does not make clear if there were detainees were on board the flights, nor does it shed any light on allegations of CIA secret prisons.
Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers, including compounds in Eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post. Human Rights Watch later identified air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of the alleged secret prisons, but both countries have denied involvement.
Clandestine prisons and secret flights via Europe to countries where suspects could face torture would breach the continent's human rights treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe, the guardian of the treaty, has no power to punish countries for breaching it, other than terminating their membership in the organization.
The European Union could theoretically suspend the voting rights of a country found to have breached the convention, however the evidence would likely have to be proved in court.
In his report, Marty said that most European government "did not seem particularly eager to establish the alleged facts."
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Trip Study Finds More Was Spent on Aides Than Lawmakers
By Kate Phillips
The New York Times
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - Congressional aides took $30 million in trips paid for by private groups from 2000 through mid-2005, surpassing the privately sponsored travel of their bosses by nearly $10 million over the same time, according to a new analysis of publicly disclosed travel expenses.
Together, aides and members of the House and Senate filed 23,000 public disclosure forms on their individual trips, the survey found, for an estimated price tag of about $50 million. Among the most popular destinations were Paris (at least 200 times), Hawaii (150) and Italy (140).
Congressional travel paid for by outside organizations like trade groups and corporations has been under intense scrutiny following scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While much attention has been focused on elected officials and corporate jet travel with lobbyists, the new study, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, Medill News Service of Northwestern University and American Public Media programs, is the most extensive in recent years because it tallied the costs, purpose and destinations of trips by Congressional aides and politicians.
The study concluded that about 90 of the trips were paid for by lobbyists, which is an ethical violation, during the five and a half years examined. About 500 trips cost $10,000 or more each, and 16 cost $25,000 or more apiece, the study showed. About $20 million was spent on overseas travel.
Wendell Rawls, acting executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that has conducted many investigations of money and politics over the years, said Monday that some trips could be considered legitimate for educational purposes. But he pointed out that the study found multiple ethics violations from members of both political parties, and that many trips were paid for by corporations that had business interests before Congress.
Mr. Rawls also questioned the amount of spending on some trips. For example, he said, former Representative Thomas Bliley, Republican of Virginia, and his wife went to London at a cost of $31,171 for four days in July 2000. Their air travel tickets were valued at $11,938.49 each, and were paid for by the Brown and Williamson tobacco company. The former congressman's public filings listed the purpose of the trip as meetings with officials from British American Tobacco and other trade officials.
"I would ask if every constituent for Representative Bliley had the same access as the people at Brown, Williamson," Mr. Rawls said of the former chairman of the House Commerce Committee. Mr. Bliley could not be reached for comment.
The study turned up other interesting educational travel and irregularities. Congressman Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, has amended his forms for a trip in 2000 to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro. He first violated ethics rules by accepting travel expenses for his son and his wife, on a trip that was supposed to address the plight of endangered birds. But confronted with the center's findings, Mr. Rangel recently reimbursed and identified additional sponsors for his son's travel and for the trip; the sponsors included one of his longtime fund-raisers, John Catsimatidis of Gristede's Foods in New York, and the Cuban government. George A. Dalley, Mr. Rangel's chief of staff, said he erred in not knowing the reporting rules.
The study singled out General Atomics, a company based in San Diego that developed the Predator, the unmanned spy plane, because it spent more - $660,000 - on Congressional travel than any other corporation on lone-sponsor trips. The study noted that General Atomics seemed to favor trips for Congressional staff members and aides. Among those on trips to Turkey in 2004 or to Australia in 2005 were aides to Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican who has since been convicted of bribery and other crimes, and an aide to Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is minority leader.
The study said that some aides sat in on sales meetings that company officials held with foreign government officials, although the aides later told the survey's interviewers that they did not engage in sales pitches.
Gary Hopper, a vice president for General Atomics' Washington offices, said: "We wouldn't mix any kind of sales situation with Congressional staff there. I know that's a bone of contention with a lot of people out there but there was not in any way a quid pro quo."
Democrats, Republicans and lobbying associations all say that travel has slowed since the scandals over the Scotland golfing trips by Representative Tom DeLay received headlines last year and put a spotlight on Congressional travel.
Paul A. Miller, the president of the American League of Lobbyists, defended travel by lobbyists and elected officials. "Since the scandal, a lot of the travel has ceased to exist or members of Congress have been very diligent by what trips we go on," Mr. Miller said. "These trips are valuable experiences for members of Congress and their staffs. If the public doesn't pay for it and the private sector doesn't pay for it, the government isn't going to pick up the tab for it."
The House and Senate have passed legislation that would require additional disclosure for lobbying, but neither bill would place a permanent ban on privately sponsored travel. It is unclear what will emerge from a House-Senate conference committee.
The Center for Public Integrity was forced last year to withdraw a study it conducted on White House travel because of a flawed database that inflated the amount of money spent as well as the number of staff members. To avoid such errors this time, Mr. Rawls said the center pored over the 26,000 pages of travel documents individually, hired outside consultants to comb the data and the findings, and made conservative estimates of the data tallies.
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Pardon Me, Mr. President! Libby's Difficult Defense
By Anna Schneider-Mayerson
New York Observer
Hours after I. Lewis Libby resigned from the White House last October, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald broke the seal on an indictment charging him with five felonies.
Now, as the pre-trial jousting in Mr. Libby's case picks up momentum, the onetime loyal West Wing confidant-Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney-will have to choose between protecting himself and protecting the White House. Specifically, insiders say, he will have to choose between a not-guilty verdict and a Presidential pardon.
"It does put him in this difficult situation of putting the administration on trial," said a lawyer in the case. "Things are coming out that would never have come out, solely because he's going to fight the charges."
As Mr. Libby's lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby's bosses.
Responding to Mr. Libby's lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column "What I Didn't Find in Africa," written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney's script with the question: "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?"
On Friday, Mr. Libby's lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn't seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy-an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.
But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.
This is the second time that Mr. Libby's lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.
In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush's insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the "leaker-in-chief."
"In defending himself, he's already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information," said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It's "exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing."
As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.
"Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn't want this stuff out there," suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. "Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he'll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect .... There's certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain."
Others rejected that theory. "Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He's not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He's just showing the court what he needs," said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.
One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald's findings.
"Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody's views on Scooter? Probably not." And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful-including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin-have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.
"From the administration's view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened," said the official.
Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.
"Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment," the official added.
In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: "The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA-and the documents they generated-are part and parcel of this story."
Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House's.
Mr. Libby's sprawling legal-defense team-which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia-declined to comment on how Mr. Libby's loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.
(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)
Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative's identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.
Based on the court's filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby's team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.
Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn't remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.
So they've requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like-among them the President's daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They've argued that Ms. Plame's C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.
Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.
They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor's focused and narrow one.
"I'm not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that's been going on in the court papers," said a lawyer familiar with the case.
But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.
The tension between a defendant and his or her employer-whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office-always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. "What's uncommon is that it's one of the highest-ranking government officials' highest-ranking deputy," he said.
One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby's team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney's deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.
Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.
"There are some times people might go down and say, 'I'm not going to raise this, I'm not going to do this'-friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision," explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.
But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers' suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.
"There is a real tension there, because you're doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty," said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. "It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense."
The lawyer added: "It's going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him-if that, in fact, occurred."
But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby's White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby's lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone "maybe [in the] State Department."
"Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn't even in the White House-we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified."
For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.
"I just don't think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people," said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. "He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case."
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European states colluded with secret CIA flights: report
Last Updated Wed, 07 Jun 2006 06:37:14 EDT
CBC News
European governments collaborated with a CIA "spider web" of rendition flights of terror suspects, according to a preliminary report.
Swiss Senator Dick Marty of the Council of Europe made his findings public in Paris on Tuesday, alleging there were corroborated facts strengthening the presumption that landing points in Romania and Poland were near secret detention centres.
The council relied on flight logs provided by the European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, as well as evidence from sources inside intelligence services.
"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe," Marty said.
"It is now clear ... that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."
He listed seven member states that could be held responsible, in varying degrees, for violations of the rights of specific individuals: Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, Italy, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey.
Several more colluded, actively or passively, in the detention or transfer of unknown persons, Marty said.
Secret flights and prisons where suspects could face torture would violate European human rights conventions.
The inquiry of the Council of Europe was launched last November after the allegations of rendition flights and air bases in Romania and Poland were brought to light by the Washington Post, Human Rights Watch and ABC News. The full report is due to be debated by the council's assembly on June 27.
The European Parliament is also investigating flight data of more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping at European destinations since the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
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Internet may have played role in bomb plot
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:11:18 EDT
CBC News
Police believe the suspects in the alleged bomb plot in Toronto may have been part of a growing trend of cyber-jihadism.
Canadian authorities estimate there are as many as 4,500 jihadist websites, and they've become the main networking tool for radicals.
It is uncensored terrain and authorities say it is growing fast.
There are calls to arms, even step-by-step instructions, from how to make an explosive to where a suicide bomber should stand in a crowded bus for maximum impact.
The recruits seem to be mostly young men at a crossroads between Islamic society and the Western world. Security experts call them the "jihad generation," young, confused and computer savvy.
"It is easier to recruit a 17-year-old who is in a crisis of identity, who is unsure of his place in the world, than it is to recruit someone who is 40, married, a job, a career, a lot of life experience to keep him balanced," said John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute.
Using the internet in such a manner has been done before.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali of Falls Church, Va., was found guilty of plotting to kill U.S. President George W. Bush and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Authorities found he had researched online terrorist manuals.
A report into the London's transit system bombings last July also found the bombers plotted their attack on the internet.
But Frank Cilluffo, who served in the U.S. Office of Homeland Security, says the street runs both ways.
"Hopefully, one of the outcomes of this case is that not only do terrorists recognize the role of the internet, but maybe they should also start recognizing that the good guys exploit that as well, and beware."
OMFG people! Why not blame Ma Bell because terrorists sometimes use phones, or maybe Ford or GM (like there's a difference) because they might have driven a car, while we're at it, I saw a guy in a turban at Orange Julius the other day, it's obvious that OJ needs to get clamped down on! People freely accessing strawberry smoothies, and eating quality food at affordable mall prices is a national threat! Why isn't anyone asking the important question? Because, when you are the biggest kid on the playground, YOU are the bully.
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Documents Shed Light on CIA's Use of Ex-Nazis
By Scott Shane
The New York Times
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informers after World War II.
The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name "Clemens" - a slight variation on his actual alias, Klement - but kept the information from Israel because of German concerns about exposure of former Nazis in the Bonn government, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.
The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the CIA to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet KGB, according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.
Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Interagency Working Group on records concerning Nazi and Japanese war crimes, said at a press briefing at the National Archives today that the documents show the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.
She said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.
As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. Captured by the United States Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognized, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.
Israeli agents hunting for Eichmann came to suspect in the 1950's that he was in Argentina but they did not know his alias. They temporarily abandoned their search at about the time, in March 1958, that West German intelligence told the CIA that Eichmann had been living in Argentina as "Clemens," said Mr. Naftali, who is now at the University of Virginia but will become director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in October.
The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi then serving as a key national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.
In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the CIA persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann's memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Globke before publication, the documents show.
Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has persuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. But the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the CIA, which sought to withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's.
After Congress extended the working group's term to 2007, and after the intervention of Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio; Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, Porter J. Goss, who was the CIA director, ordered the release of the records with very few deletions.
Stanley Moskowitz, a CIA official who assisted the working group for the last year, said the delicate question of releasing operational files has long been a "nettlesome problem" but that "the passage of time has shifted the balance" toward release. He said the new CIA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has agreed to continue releasing the records.
Norman J.W. Goda, an Ohio University historian who reviewed the CIA material, said it showed in greater detail than previously known how the KGB aggressively targeted former Nazi intelligence officers for recruitment after the war. In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the post-war West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the CIA.
Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the KGB Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence - placing a Soviet agent in charge of combating Soviet espionage in West Germany.
The CIA shared much sensitive information with Felfe, who visited the agency in 1956 to lobby for West German involvement in CIA operations, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 CIA damage assessment, written after Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 CIA staffers" and seen that many eavesdropping operations ended with "complete failure or a worthless product."
The documents show that the CIA ignored "clear evidence of a war crimes record" in recruiting another former SS officer, Tscherim Soobzokov, said another historian at the briefing, Richard Breitman of American University. Because it valued Soobzokov for his language skills and ties to fellow ethnic Circassians living in the Soviet Caucasus region, the CIA deliberately hid his Nazi record from the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he moved to the United States in 1955, Mr. Breitman said.
But Soobzokov would not ultimately escape his past. He died in 1985 of injuries suffered three weeks earlier when a pipe bomb exploded outside his house in Paterson, NJ. The murder case has never been solved.
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Canadian terror suspect accused of aiming to behead PM
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 02:37:01
OTTAWA, June 6 (Xinhua) -- One of the 17 terror suspects arrested over the weekend near Canada's business centre Toronto is accused of wanting to storm Parliament, behead the prime minister and attack a number of important sites, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Lawyer Gary Batasar, who represents 25-year-old restaurant worker Steven Chand from Toronto, made the comments after a court appearance in Brampton, Ontario, on Tuesday.
"The allegations are quite serious, including storming and bombing of various buildings," Batasar said.
"There's an allegation that my client personally indicated thathe wanted to behead the prime minister of Canada," he said.
Batasar said he was given an eight-page synopsis of the allegations, including storming Parliament, blowing up some of the buildings and taking politicians hostage to demand the withdrawal of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. If the demands were not met, it is alleged, Chand wanted to behead Stephen Harper.
The 12 adults and five youths were arrested in southern Ontario as part of the largest operation carried out under Canada's Anti-terrorism Act. It involved as many as 400 police officers and security officials.
Local media have reported the suspects are accused of plotting terrorist attacks in different cities in southern Ontario. The targets included political and economic symbols including the Parliament Buildings and Peace Tower in capital Ottawa, along with the CN Tower and Toronto Stock Exchange in Toronto.
The 15 people, with another two already in prison on other crime charges, appeared at the court Tuesday amid tight security for the second time after their first court appearance on Saturday. The bail hearing could take several days, lawyers said.
The 12 adult suspects have been charged with knowingly participating, directly or indirectly, in the activity of a terrorist group. Six of them were also charged with planning to cause a deadly explosion, which could result in life prison if convicted.
Three of the suspects have been charged with importing firearms and prohibited ammunition, and supplying prohibited weapons.
Ten of the men are charged with engaging in terrorism-related training.
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Weapons smuggling into Gaza increases after Israeli pullout
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 03:03:58
JERUSALEM, June 6 (Xinhua) -- Israeli internal security service Shin Bet said on Tuesday that the amount of weapons and explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip since Israel's pullout from the region was bigger than the total amount smuggled into the strip since the 1967 Middle East war.
According to local newspaper the Jerusalem Post, Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin made the remarks in a meeting of the Knesset (parliament) Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
Diskin was quoted as elaborating at the meeting that since the Israeli army left Gaza in September 2005, there were 11 tons of TNT, three million bullets, 19,600 rifles, 1,600 pistols, 65 RPG launchers, 430 RPGs and some 10 shoulder rocket launchers smuggled into Israel.
Diskin believed that Qassam rockets fired against Israel from the Gaza Strip would continue, according to the report.
Last September, Israel withdrew from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank under the leadership of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
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Another Terrorist Attack Coming Soon? U.S. Secret Gov and Israel's MOSSAD in Planning Stages
CBS
June 5, 2006
U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they'd be surprised if it didn't come by the end of the year, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart in a CBS News exclusive.
The first of the domestic incidents, all of which drew little attention at the time, began with the holdup of a string of Torrance, Calif. gas stations last summer. Muslim converts who bonded together in prison planned to use the robberies to finance attacks on 20 Army recruiting stations.
Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton admits they stumbled on the plot during a search.
"Make no mistake about it," Bratton said. "We dodged a bullet here - perhaps many bullets."
Police in Toledo, Ohio, busted another cell in February. This one consisted of three men training to attack U.S. forces overseas. Once again, luck played a role. When they tried to enlist someone in their mosque to help, he turned them in.
"These individuals are often hiding in plain sight in cities like Torrance and now Toledo," says John Pistole, a FBI deputy director.
Two months ago, a pair of Atlanta men, one a Georgia Tech engineering student, were arrested not long after communicating by e-mail with two of the suspects arrested in Canada over the weekend. The Atlanta men are charged with videotaping domestic targets, including the U.S. Capitol and the World Bank.
Analysts now conclude similarities between all the cases were dramatic: All were self-financed, self-motivated, and in each case the men were seeking out others to join their cell.
In short, Osama bin Laden didn't pay for these plots, recruit for them or even know of them. They were all totally homegrown - even amateurish. But if four, including the one in Canada, have been uncovered in just 11 months, officials fear there are inevitably other plots that have not been and are maturing even now.
The next attack here, officials predict, will bear no resemblance to Sept. 11. The casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first, they say. But it's coming - of that they seem certain.
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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"Rendition" 'massively damaging' to counter-terrorism effort
James Sturcke and agencies
Wednesday June 7, 2006
The British government's apparent support of CIA rendition flights is "massively damaging" in the battle against international terrorism, a former Foreign Office minister said today.
Tony Lloyd demanded that the Bush administration give "proper and definitive" answers to allegations that it has been kidnapping terrorist suspects and transferring them to countries where they could be tortured.
He was speaking as the Council of Europe human rights' committee named Britain among 14 countries that had colluded with the CIA practice, and called on the government to ask Washington "the right questions" about what the US flights that passed through Britain were being used.
He also called for "truthful answers" from the Bush administration.
"If these things are born out, this process is really damaging to any attempt to combat terrorism in our society," he said. "It leads to the suspicion that what we are doing is the wrong tactic and even as bad as the terrorists themselves."
Mr Lloyd, a foreign office minister between 1997-99, told the BBC's Today programme that the word "rendition" was a euphemism for "kidnapping" and as such would be illegal under British law.
He said it had to be established whether the British government had taken part in an illegal activity under domestic law, and whether the Bush administration had "abused agreements" over the use of British airspace and airports.
"But the real issue is that this is massively damaging to the battle against terrorism," he added.
During prime minister's questions, Tony Blair was challenged by the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, on whether the government had provided logistical support to the CIA flights.
"We have said absolutely everything we have to say on this," Mr Blair replied. "There is no more to add to that. The report adds absolutely nothing to the information we already have. We have kept parliament informed."
The government has acknowledged there were four rendition requests in 1998, two of which were granted.
A Foreign Office spokesman said today that the department was still studying the report but that there did not appear "to be much new stuff".
He repeated the government's line that some flights did land on UK soil but that there was no evidence to suggest that they were being used for rendition purposes. He also said the UK government did not condone torture in "any way, shape or form".
William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, said: "It is very important that the war against terror is conducted within the rule of law. Otherwise those of us fighting terrorism lose our moral authority."
Mr Hague told Sky News he had warned the US administration on a recent trip to Washington about the dangers of clandestine tactics in the war on terror. He called for European governments to give "a convincing response" to the report.
Michael Moore, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, demanded an independent inquiry into the CIA flights.
"This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of or involvement in rendition and secret detentions," he said.
"Ministers must answer specific allegations of British assistance, and explain why they have failed to ask hard questions of their American counterparts."
He said that parliamentary questions tabled by Lib Dem MPs on specific flights through the UK remained unanswered over two months on.
"This is wholly unacceptable and follows a pattern of evasion and obfuscation by the government," he said.
Claudio Cardone of Amnesty International said that "kidnapping" and transferring suspects to different countries in secret could not be justified.
"Intelligence is needed. Nobody wants to be blown up, but unless this is done on the basis of international principles of law ... then you have lost to the terrorists," he told Sky News.
The Polish prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, denied the report's suggestion that the CIA flights stopped or dropped off prisoners in Poland.
"This is slander and it's not based on any facts," Mr Marcinkiewicz told reporters in Warsaw.
A spokesman for the Spanish foreign ministry denied it had taken part "actively or passively" in rendition flights. "The government does not have even the slightest information" about stopovers on the Balearic islands, El País website reported.
Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centres, including compounds in eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post.
The humanitarian group Human Rights Watch later identified air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of alleged secret prisons.
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CIA knew where Eichmann was two years before he was caught
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Independent
07 June 2006
The CIA knew the whereabouts of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina more than two years before his capture by Israeli agents, but kept the fact secret to protect its anti-Communist efforts in West Germany, according to newly declassified agency documents.
The documents, among 27,000 pages of CIA records released by the National Archives here, indicate that the agency was told in 1958 by then West German intelligence that Eichmann was living under an alias in the Buenos Aires area. But the CIA did nothing, and Eichmann - the infamous organiser of the trains that carried Jews to the Nazi extermination camps - was eventually seized by Mossad agents in 1960, and flown back to Israel where he was tried and, in 1962, executed.
The CIA's inaction reflected the shift in US foreign policy goals almost as soon as the Second World War was over, from hunting down Nazi war criminals to enlisting help for the new priority of fighting Communism, as it threatened to engulf not only all of Germany, but parts of western Europe as well.
In the case of Eichmann, the documents show the CIA was desperate not to compromise Hans Globke, a former Nazi who stayed on in West Germany and helped organise anti-Communist initiatives there.
Eichmann was only one prominent former war criminal to benefit. In 1983, Washington admitted that US Army intelligence officers helped the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," flee to Bolivia and escape prosecution by France after the war. A government report at the time admitted that the officers "interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice" by protecting him after he had been recruited as an anti-Communist spy.
Historians have chronicled how the US allowed in hundreds if not thousands of Nazi regime members and former Nazi collaborators from eastern European countries that fell under Soviet domination. "We knew what we were doing," one senior CIA officer was quoted as saying in a 1989 book."Any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist."
After Eichmann was captured, the CIA pressed US publications to keep quiet about his connection with Globke. Life magazine, which had bought Eichmann's memoirs, dropped a mention of Globke "at our request," according to a memorandum from the then CIA director, Allen Dulles.
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Promise not to stop when I say 'when'?
Human stem cell cloning project begins at Harvard
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:48:06 EDT
CBC News
Researchers associated with Harvard say they've started to clone human embryos to access stem cells, using private money.
In 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush banned the use of federal research funds for new lines of human embryonic stem cells.
Stem cells are like master cells that can produce any kind of tissue in the body.
"Our long-term goal is to create embryonic stem cells from a patient's tissues, correct the genetic defects, and get the repaired cells back into the patients," said George Daley, who will lead one research project at Boston Children's Hospital.
In the meantime, Daley said his team plans to use embryonic stem cells to increase the chances of a successful transfer while answering basic questions about stem cell biology.
Some people object to cloning human embryos on ethical grounds.
The project has been carefully reviewed and the team will follow strict guidelines, Harvard Provost Stephen Hyman told reporters Tuesday.
The project will cost millions, paid for exclusively by private donors, Daley said.
Earlier this year, a scandal erupted among stem cell researchers. Investigators concluded a South Korean scientist who claimed to create 11 lines of embryonic stem cells matched to human patients had faked the results.
Independent scientists will be able to verify the Harvard findings, Daley said.
The lab will use donor eggs and embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.
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Rhythm method kills more embryos than condom use
From New Scientist Print Edition
03 June 2006
"IF YOU'RE concerned about embryonic death, you've got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method," says Luc Bovens of the London School of Economics.
People who practise this form of birth control, the only form condoned by the Catholic church, try to avoid pregnancy by abstaining from sex during a woman's fertile period. But Bovens says it leads to more embryo deaths than other contraceptive methods.
Bovens estimates that if the rhythm method is 90 per cent effective, and if conceptions outside the fertile period are about twice as likely to fail as to survive, then "millions of rhythm method cycles per year globally depend for their success on massive embryonic death".
If he's right,couples using the rhythm method for religious reasons may want to think again. "Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method," Bovens writes (Journal of Medical Ethics, vol 32, p 355).
Roger Gosden at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility in New York says the suggestion is reasonable.
"It's quite plausible that more abnormal embryos are conceived at the limits of sperm and especially egg viability," he says, "and that these are more frequent in women practising rhythm contraception than those having unprotected intercourse at random stages of the menstrual cycle."
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 03 June 2006, page 19
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Hurricane Katrina displaces 400,000 in US: report
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 14:11:21
BEIJING, June 7 (Xinuanet) -- Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 400,000 people from the New Orleans area and the Mississippi Gulf Coast last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report Wednesday.
The figures show that the New Orleans metropolitan area remained vastly shrunken in population four months after the storm, having lost 378,000 people.
The Gulfport-Biloxi region, which lost 41,000 people from before Katrina to January, was the second among metropolitan areas for population loss, the figures show.
Census officials warned that some of the figures are subject to larger than normal margins of error and, moreover, that the figures are already at least five months old.
David Bowman, a researcher for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, estimated that the population of New Orleans has grown from 156,000 in January to 192,000 in May. About 450,000 people lived there before Katrina.
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An Increasingly Deadly Trail
By John Pomfret
The Washington Post
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Tighter border has illegal immigrants risking more perilous routes.
Covered Wells, Ariz. - It was early on a May morning, still dark, when Border Patrol agent Dan McClafferty first smelled death, its rich odor piercing the desert bouquet of sage, salt cedar and creosote. Following the beam of his flashlight, McClafferty looked under the thorny branches of a paloverde tree and found what he was looking for.
The body of the 3-year-old boy lay still, covered with a jacket and his arms crossed over his chest. His mother, found wandering along a desert highway hours earlier, had carried him there as she had tried to cross into the United States illegally.
The sad discovery was not unique. Since 1993, when the Clinton administration began a crackdown on border crossings in San Diego and El Paso, more than 3,500 people have died trying to cross into the United States through desert. And, as officials work to put more patrols and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant advocates fear there will be more deaths among the tens of thousands who attempt the trip.
Most of the deaths so far - 959 since Oct. 1, 2001, according to local government statistics and the Mexican government - have been in Arizona, where the landscape comprises mountains, ranches, Indian reservations, military proving grounds and endless miles of cactus-filled desert. The boy, who was found on May 16 and whose name could not be ascertained from U.S. or Mexican officials, was one of the latest additions to the list.
Border Patrol statistics show that while the death toll mounts annually, the number of those apprehended while crossing the border has not changed significantly since 1993. But because federal agencies have tightened the border in urban areas, smugglers who move the men, women and children seeking to enter the United States illegally have funneled them onto increasingly perilous trails where temperatures are high, water is scarce and danger is abundant.
"All the evidence is that increased enforcement on the border has achieved no benefit at all except in additional employment of Border Patrol agents," said John Fife, a Tucson pastor and founder of No More Deaths, a coalition of charities devoted to stopping deaths during desert border crossings. "What has changed is the devastating elements of this policy. You have a number of deaths that surpasses the number of American deaths in Iraq. And yet still we are determined to persist and redouble our efforts."
The other view is that a tipping point could be reached if the flow of agents and materiel to the border continues to increase. Since 1993, the Border Patrol has tripled in size and President Bush has pledged to add 6,000 more agents. He also has ordered the National Guard, which began deploying to the border Monday, to help build new fencing and other protections. "America has the best technology in the world, and we will ensure that the Border Patrol has the technology they need to do their job and secure our border," Bush said May 15 in a nationally televised speech.
Even as the president was speaking, McClafferty was searching the Arizona desert.
A Toxic Mix
The 3-year-old's mother's name was Edith Rodreguez. She and her son crossed into the United States from Sasabe, Mexico, on May 11, said a spokesman for the Mexican consulate in Tucson. A native of the Mexican state of Veracruz, a major source for illegal immigration, the 25-year-old woman was traveling in a group of eight to 10 people, herded north by a smuggler, called a coyote.
To keep the group moving fast, the coyote handed out a Mexican over-the-counter drug called Sedalmerk, consulate spokesman Alejandro Ramos Cardoso said after Mexican officials interviewed Rodreguez. Sedalmerk is a combination of caffeine, Tylenol and the herbal supplement ephedra - an amphetamine precursor that is banned in the United States.
Sedalmerk may be safe to use as a pick-me-up in a normal environment but it is a toxic mix when combined with a trek through the desert because it accelerates dehydration, McClafferty said. Two days into the journey, the boy's energy was flagging and he was dehydrated. On May 13, Ramos Cardoso said, the coyote and the rest of the crossers abandoned Rodreguez and her son, leaving them to walk in the desert by themselves.
Rodreguez began carrying the child, moving north through a sliver of earth hemmed in by two mountain ranges on land belonging to the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation. Sometime that day, the boy lost consciousness, Ramos Cardoso said. But Rodreguez kept on walking, clutching him.
A Search for a Child
In early January, the Border Patrol began concentrating on Arizona's Altar Valley, which had become a virtual highway into the United States for thousands of illegal immigrants and is dotted with natural water holes and water stations serviced by American charities. The renewed enforcement there resulted in traffic being diverted to the Tohono O'odham land that has less water.
Some religious and charitable groups have placed water barrels in the desert and handed out maps in Mexico showing their locations, drawing the ire of those who seek tougher enforcement along the border. One of the groups, Humane Borders, received permission to keep water barrels on land belonging to the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department, the city of Tucson and Pima County. But the Tohono O'odham tribe has declined to give its permission.
It was on that land that Rodreguez found herself walking with her son. She carried him for more than a day, Ramos Cardoso said, before placing him under the paloverde tree and going to look for help.
Like many who cross the border illegally, Rodreguez had been in the United States before. She worked menial jobs in Kentucky, where she met a man who apparently was married. The two had a relationship and Rodreguez got pregnant, Ramos Cardoso said. She decided to have the baby in Veracruz so her mother could help her. Returning to Mexico to have a baby was an unusual decision - many Mexican women make the reverse trip, traveling to the United States to have their babies so their children will be U.S. citizens.
Earlier this year, Rodreguez decided to return to the United States to show the boy to his father, Ramos Cardoso said. She traveled to Sasabe, joined the coyote's group and walked across the border.
After placing her son under the tree, Rodreguez chanced upon Highway 86, which runs through the heart of Tohono O'odham. There, on the afternoon of May 15, Border Patrol agents picked her up.
Ramos Cardoso said she told the agents immediately that she had left her son in the desert, but Gustavo Soto, a Border Patrol spokesman, said they learned of a missing boy four hours later after she was sent to a processing center in the border town of Nogales before she was returned to Mexico.
McClafferty received word about the missing boy that night. He is a member of BorStar, the Border Patrol's elite search and rescue unit, established in 1998 to help save illegal immigrants lost in the desert. When McClafferty went searching for the boy, it was unclear whether he was alive. He said he was told that the mother was so distraught that Border Patrol agents understood only that her son was missing.
McClafferty and three other agents began bushwhacking through the desert scrub, looking for footprints, where Rodreguez had been found. There were thousands, making it impossible to track the boy that way.
Back at Nogales, Border Patrol agents photographed the bottom of Rodreguez's shoes and faxed the image to McClafferty. Just as the sun was setting, he found matches in the dust. For the next seven hours he and the other agents tracked them by flashlight.
"We figured she was in bad shape," McClafferty said. "She was walking around in circles. She went for help then went back to her son but couldn't find him."
In the end, McClafferty smelled the boy's remains before he found them.
"She carried her kid in the desert for four or five hours and not one of them helped her," McClafferty said of the others who walked in with Rodreguez. "I've seen a lot in six years, but this kid thing was one of those that I just couldn't file away."
More Deaths Expected
After being expelled from the United States, Rodreguez was allowed back on May 18 on a short-term humanitarian visa to identify her son's body. An autopsy revealed that the probable cause of death was dehydration and exposure to the sun. The temperature had been above 100 degrees during their journey.
Eric Peters, deputy chief medical examiner for Pima County, placed the time of death between May 13 and May 14, meaning the boy had probably died in his mother's arms.
The last time a young child died on the border, according to Pima County records, was November, when a 1-year-old girl succumbed to pneumonia. Peters said authorities told him they had seen women with babies trudging through the reservation lands, and he and his colleagues are bracing for more child deaths this summer.
The Tohono O'odham police considered charging Rodreguez with child endangerment, but the Pima County attorney's office said it had no interest in prosecuting her. Rodreguez returned to Mexico on May 20 and her son's body followed two days later.
Ramos Cardoso said he tried to persuade Rodreguez to speak to the media because the consulate hoped her story would encourage others not to follow her.
"She had been through a lot of suffering," he said. "She told us she just wanted to go home."
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Letting babies cry will only end in more tears
From New Scientist Print Edition
Jon Sutton
01 June 2006
PARENTS of bawling babies take note: comforting them may work better than leaving them to cry - at least during the first few weeks of life.
Ian St James-Roberts of the University of London's Institute of Education and his colleagues recruited new parents from London and Copenhagen, Denmark. They also recruited a group of "proximal-care" parents from the UK, Denmark and the US, who planned to hold their infants for much of the time that they were awake and respond rapidly if they cried.
The parents were asked to keep a diary of their infants' crying and night waking as well as their own responses at 8-14 days, 5-6 weeks and 10-14 weeks of age. These were backed up by audio recordings, questionnaires on the babies' feeding and sleeping patterns, and home visits by the researchers.
At 10 days proximal-care parents held their babies for around 16 hours a day, and were more likely than other parents to sleep in the same bed as them at night. London parents held their babies for around 8 hours 30 minutes a day, and Copenhagen parents for just under 10 hours a day. The London parents also left their crying or fussing babies for much longer than both of the other groups.
The hands-off approach adopted by the London parents appeared to backfire: their children fussed and cried 50 per cent more than the other two groups at two and five weeks of age, and they were still crying more after 12 weeks.
The results also suggest there is little to gain from giving your baby a very high level of comfort and care. In general, Copenhagen babies cried as little as those given proximal care, and at 12 weeks they woke and cried slightly less often at night.
Comforting your baby on demand could minimise fussing and crying during the early weeks, concludes St James-Roberts, who presented his findings at a conference on infant sleeping and crying in Leicester, UK, last month. "But it makes no difference to the unsoothable bouts of crying that are the core of colic."
The results will be published in Pediatrics this week.
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 01 June 2006, page 17
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Invisibility cloak leaves the realm of magic at last
From New Scientist Print Edition
Zeeya Merali
03 June 2006
HIDING objects inside a cloak that channels light around them to make it look as if they aren't there may soon be possible thanks to a breakthrough idea by materials scientists. It raises the prospect of invisibility shields that could hide objects sitting right under your nose.
Objects are visible simply because light scatters off their surfaces and into your eyes. So in theory, a cloaking device could work by steering light around an object so that you see only the light from behind it, and not the object itself. Now John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, and his colleagues have worked out how this could be done with a spherical cloak that channels light around an object hidden at its centre (see Diagram).
The stuff that makes this plausible is a new generation of "metamaterials", which can be tailored to have exotic electrical and magnetic properties not found in nature. The metamaterials developed so far consist of complex arrays of metal washer-like shapes and wires. The metal shapes are smaller than the wavelength of light and so interact with it, explains Pendry. "On these scales, it is not the chemical properties of the metal that determine how it interacts with light, it's the metal's structure."
The new idea is to build a sphere of metamaterial whose components are arranged in such a way that they bend radiation around the central cavity before sending it on its way, like a ring road diverting traffic around a town.
Team member David Smith at Duke University in North Carolina has already created a metamaterial that bends microwaves, and is now putting the cloaking idea into practice to make a microwave invisibility shield. "The theory tells us the material properties we need at each point," says Smith. "The challenge is to match those theoretical requirements in the actual material, point-by-point." The team hopes to complete it within a year.
The principle is exactly the same for visible light, but you may have to wait a little while for your invisibility bubble: nobody has yet succeeded in making metamaterials that work at optical wavelengths. However, "many teams are already involved in shrinking metamaterials down to these scales," says Smith.
Another hurdle is that the materials can only steer light in a narrow band of wavelengths, which is fine for microwave radar, for example, but not the entire spectrum of visible light (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1125907).
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 03 June 2006, page 13
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NYC may compensate security fund cuts with tax hike
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 11:52:56
NEW YORK, June 6 (Xinhua) -- New Yorkers could face taxes hikes to make up for the cut in counter-terrorism funding from the federal government, said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Tuesday.
"We're going to do what we think is right, and if the burden falls solely on the taxpayers of New York City, that's not good, but in the end the number one priority is to provide security," said the mayor.
The Homeland Security plans to cut counter-terrorism funding for New York City by 40 percent, or some 83 million dollars in 2006, including fund to pay for the counter-terror efforts of such agencies as the police department, fire department, hospitals, and even the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is in charge of public transportation.
Bloomberg said New Yorkers may have to pick up the slack.
The Department of Homeland Security said one of the reasons it reduced the city's security funding is because of problems with New York's application. But local politicians argued that there is no excuse when it comes to protecting a high terror target.
"I think the Homeland Security application process should be designed and tailored to meet the needs and threats that exist in this country," said Congressman Vito Fossella.
Fossella called on the White House to intervene in the matter. Many New York lawmakers tried to reverse the department's decision.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the cuts were based on "odd" and "incompetent" evaluations on what constitutes a monument. As a result, neither the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building nor the New York Stock Exchange are considered monuments by the agency.
Giuliani said he would join the fight to get the money reinstated.
New York Senator Charles Schumer accused Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff of playing politics, and tried to introduce legislation to safeguard the city against future cuts by requiring federal funds be distributed based solely on the level of risk.
In his meeting with Chertoff on Monday, Bloomberg said he was disappointed with the 40-percent cut in federal funding. He also criticized the decision to categorize many cities as "high risk," spreading the money around thinly.
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Cautionary tale of Numero Cinco
Spanish Court Investigates: China rejects Spain's 'genocide' claims and interference
By Alexa Olesen in Beijing
07 June 2006
China has denounced a Spanish court's investigation into claims of genocide in Tibet as an interference in its internal affairs and dismissed the allegations as "sheer fabrication".
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Liu Jianchao, said Beijing opposed any interference in its internal affairs, including on Tibet issues.
A Spanish judge opened proceedings on Monday in a lawsuit brought by the Madrid-based Committee to Support Tibet. The group filed the suit against several former Chinese officials under a Spanish law that allows prosecution of human rights crimes.
In its lawsuit, the human rights group said that more than one million Tibetans had been killed or gone missing since China occupied Tibet in 1951.
Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile in India after an abortive 1959 uprising against increasingly heavy-handed Chinese rule. China has labelled the Dalai Lama a separatist seeking to use his religious authority to gain independence for Tibet.
The Spanish National Court will hear witnesses before deciding whether to file charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, state terrorism and torture against China's former president Jiang Zemin, the former prime minister Li Peng and five military and security officials in Tibet, some of whom have retired.
Mr Liu said China and Spain had friendly ties and had enjoyed a "smooth development of bilateral relations in recent years".
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France backs down on deportation of immigrant children
by Emma Charlton
AFP
June 6, 2006
PARIS - The French government said it would scale back plans to expel illegal immigrant families with children enrolled at French schools, after hundreds of teachers, parents and activists joined forces to block their deportation.
Hundreds of immigrant families had been given the right to remain until the end of their children's school year on June 30 -- at which point state officials were under instructions to arrest and conduct them to the border.
Residence permits will now be granted on a case-by-case basis to families whose children were born or arrived at a "very young age" in France and who do not speak the language of their country of origin, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced.
Around 750 families, or 2,500 people, will have their cases reviewed by a committee made up of government officials and immigrant support groups.
The Education Without Borders Network (RESF), which is campaigning for all the children and families concerned to be given residence rights, dismissed the announcement as a token gesture.
RESF -- which had previously said some 10,000 children were at risk of deportation -- now believes at least 50,000 families to be concerned, based on interior ministry figures, said its spokesman Richard Moyon.
"As many as 100,000 children of illegal immigrants are enrolled in French schools, so this so-called humanitarian gesture will reach a mere one or two percent."
However Sarkozy ruled out a large-scale amnesty for clandestine immigrants with children in the French school system, which he argued would create a new "channel" for illegal immigration.
Anyone is free to register their child at a school in France -- without having to produce identity or residence papers.
France's centre-right government has vowed to step up the deportation of illegal immigrants -- who number 200,000 to 400,000 in the country -- as part of a toughening of immigration policy backed by three-quarters of the public.
To encourage families to leave, the interior ministry recently raised the relocation funds paid to illegal immigrants, from 150 to 2,000 euros (190 to 2,500 dollars) per person, plus 1,000 euros per child under 18.
Since 2004, RESF has blocked dozens of deportations -- which are part of a wider move to tighten immigration rules under Sarkozy's authority.
Schoolteachers, parents and activists in the network say many of the children concerned are well-integrated and thriving in the French school system, and that to deport them would violate the principles of the republic.
RESF also charges that many have been unfairly denied political asylum in France and could face persecution upon their return home.
Since late April, more than 40,000 people have signed an RESF petition against what they denounce as a "childhunt" -- pledging to "sponsor, protect and house" the children and their families, even it if means breaking the law.
Sarkozy announced the scale-back of his deportation plans as the Senate began debating a hotly-contested new immigration law adopted by the National Assembly last month.
The law on "selected immigration" aims to favour skilled workers and cut back on family reunification, while scrapping automatic residence rights for illegal immigrants who have spent 10 years in the country.
Sarkozy strongly denies that his policies are racist -- Africans make up a majority of illegal immigrants in France -- warning that a failure to combat the phenomenon would play into the hands of the xenophobic far-right.
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Have we got gravity all wrong?
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Stuart Clark
03 June 2006
SLAVA TURYSHEV is a man on a mission. Two missions in fact. The researcher from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is about to re-fly the two most controversial spacecraft in history. The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes were launched in 1972 and 1973 and are now drifting in deep space beyond the outermost planets of the solar system. NASA lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003, but though the probes are now long gone, they are anything but forgotten. That's because Pioneer 10, when last heard from, seemed to be off course by around 400,000 kilometres and nobody has ever been able to figure out why. Did some malfunction nudge the craft off its expected trajectory, or are there deeper forces at work?
Pioneer 10's sister ship is also being pushed off course, and an analysis of the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter and the Ulysses solar probe hints that they are affected by a similar anomaly. This has led some physicists to suggest that the Pioneer probes may have exposed a fundamental flaw in our understanding of how objects move through space under the influence of gravity. Turyshev's mission might be the best chance we have to see if our best theory of gravity, Einstein's general theory of relativity, needs an upgrade.
Turyshev will not, however, be launching two replica craft into space. His missions will be virtual ones, in which he will replay the data from the real flights to see if he can detect where and how things started going wrong.
The project nearly failed at the first hurdle. Though the Pioneers have been flying for more than 30 years, the anomaly in their trajectories is based on observations from only a small portion of their journeys: 11.5 years for Pioneer 10 and just 3.75 years for Pioneer 11. Turyshev needed the data for the rest of the flights, but when he went in search of it he found that the magnetic tapes and floppy discs had gone astray. After much searching, all he could find were 400 reels of magnetic tape, stored in boxes under a staircase at JPL. The tapes contained the full 30 years' worth of measurements about the spacecrafts' trajectories, but there was a snag. Years of heat and humidity had started to take their toll on the tapes, and he feared they might have become unreadable.
Luckily, he knew someone who could help. Software engineer Kyong Lee at JPL was able to coax the tapes into revealing their precious data, which he re-recorded on DVD. Last year Turyshev had another stroke of luck when he visited NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "I had gone to Ames to give a lecture, specifically to interest people in investigating the Pioneer anomaly," he says. He knew that sitting somewhere in the research complex were the project documents, including records from 114 onboard sensors that recorded the spacecrafts' manoeuvres and spin rate, as well as "housekeeping" data. Throughout the Pioneers' three-decade voyages, the craft beamed back this telemetry data to Earth so that engineers on the ground could monitor each spacecraft's vital signs. All this data had been painstakingly stored on floppy discs by mission engineer Larry Kellogg, who figured that it could one day be used to construct a computer program to teach children how a real spacecraft operated.
With access to both the tracking measurements and telemetry data, Turyshev was confident that he had everything he would need to build a virtual model of the spacecraft, and investigate whether a malfunction was causing the anomaly. His optimism was short-lived, though. Straight after the talk, managers at Ames told him they had earmarked the data discs for destruction because they were taking up too much space. The first dumpster had already been delivered and was sitting outside waiting to be filled. In desperation, Turyshev offered to return at the weekend with a truck of his own to collect the material. He had no idea where he was going to store it, but he knew he could not allow this priceless information to be destroyed. In the end, the Ames managers relented, and found a place to store the 60 filing cabinets' worth of data.
The next problem was how to read the obsolete discs. Kellogg introduced Turyshev to Viktor Toth, a C++ programmer and space enthusiast living in Ottawa, Canada. Toth volunteered to write a program that would extract the 40 gigabytes of data from the old floppies and record it onto DVDs. That has now been done, and the data is about to be released to groups throughout the world so that the virtual re-flight of Pioneer can begin.
Several teams will pore through the telemetry data, watching for every firing of the thrusters and every malfunction, no matter how slight. Each event will then be checked against the tracking data, which tells them how fast and in what direction the spacecraft is moving. In this way they will be able to reconstruct, moment by moment, the condition and movement of the spacecraft (see "Anatomy of an anomaly"). The job will take at least a year to complete. There are nearly 95,000 measurements to correlate for Pioneer 10 alone, covering 29 years of the mission during which the spacecraft travelled more than 12 billion kilometres (see Diagram). Nothing similar has ever been attempted before, Turyshev says. "This is the first time in history that a space mission will be reconstructed."
Constant force
The investigators are faced with a painstaking task, as the malfunction they are looking for is likely to be a tiny one. "The leak of a single molecule of gas from the spacecraft will give a momentary acceleration similar in size to the Pioneer anomaly," says Dario Izzo, a mission analyst from the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Thankfully, the force acting on the craft is a persistent one, so if a malfunction of the spacecraft's systems is the cause it must be long-lived too.
With this in mind, the teams plan to concentrate their attention on the prime suspect for the anomaly: the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) on each Pioneer probe. The RTGs, which convert heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity to power the spacecraft, are held on a boom away from the spacecraft's body. Even from here a little waste heat from the generator might reach the probe. This could raise the temperature on one side of it, producing a feeble thrust as the energy radiates away into space. Turyshev has high hopes that the telemetry data will allow the researchers to study the impact of the RTG for the first time. "The plutonium's half-life is 87.7 years, and I believe that we will able to see this decay in the telemetry and account for its effects," he says. Once researchers have done that, and other checks, whatever remains is the Pioneer anomaly. "We may end up with a smaller Pioneer anomaly than at present - or better with nothing at all," Turyshev says.
But what if the teams convince themselves that there is no onboard explanation for the anomaly? Their next step then will be to measure the precise direction in which the force is acting. The best we can say at the moment is that it seems to point back towards the sun, but that is only because the limited measurements and analysis available till now make the Earth's direction virtually indistinguishable from the sun's. Signals from the earlier part of the mission should resolve this, because the difference between the sun's and the Earth's directions should be more noticeable in measurements taken when the spacecraft was closer to Earth. If the anomalous force points towards the Earth, it will mean that it is an artefact of the way the tracking stations on Earth collected the signals, and the mystery of the Pioneer anomaly will be solved.
Turyshev's effort comes at a time of growing interest in the anomaly. Two years ago, when ESA asked researchers to submit ideas for missions to launch between 2015 and 2025, several of the proposals were for experiments to investigate the Pioneer anomaly. This led Izzo and his team at ESA to analyse various strategies to study it. "If I had the money I would launch a mission just to study the gravitational field of the outer solar system," he says. The central component of the mission would be a small sphere of precisely known mass with a highly reflective surface. The sphere would move as gravity dictates, along a trajectory known as a geodesic. A conventional spacecraft would follow, firing a laser beam at the sphere's reflective surface to track its movements. As well as investigating the Pioneer anomaly, such a mission would be the most precise test yet of general relativity.
Planetary puzzle
Izzo concedes, though, that this is probably not going to happen, at least not as the dedicated mission he would like. "I have to be realistic," he says, and that means piggybacking the mission onto something that will tour the outer solar system. He and his collaborator Andreas Rathke at EADS Astrium in Germany propose doing this on ESA's next mission to Jupiter or one of the other outer planets.
Not everyone thinks the Pioneer anomaly deserves the attention it is getting. Lorenzo Iorio of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Bari points out that if the anomaly is due to gravity, then it should act on the planets as well as spacecraft. Yet the outer planets are moving entirely as expected, Iorio says, so the anomaly must arise from a fault with the Pioneer craft. Another doubter is Daniel Whitmire, an astronomer at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. In a study in 2002 of the behaviour of comets from the farthest realms of the solar system, he failed to observe any strange gravitational effects. He is also quick to dismiss a suggestion by Gary Page of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, that the unexplained disappearance of an asteroid called 1995SN55 occurred because it was pulled off course by the same forces that act on the Pioneer craft. None of this persuades Izzo to give up the hunt. "There are many complicating factors and uncertainties in planetary orbits that will mask the Pioneer anomaly," he says.
The achievements of Pioneers 10 and 11 as the first missions to visit Jupiter and Saturn are already being overshadowed by the mystery of their unexpected trajectory through deep space, but with the stakes so high, even those who found the Pioneer anomaly are determined to remain sceptical. "I'm trying to remain open-minded," Turyshev says. "That is why I want to reanalyse the data from the full Pioneer 10 and 11 missions to see if we can explain the anomaly with things that were happening on the spacecraft." If after that the anomaly persists, it might be time to start thinking the unthinkable: that two distant spacecraft have provided the first clear evidence for a breakdown in Einstein's theory of gravity.
Stuart Clark is a science journalist based in the UK.
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 03 June 2006, page 46
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Cave face 'the oldest portrait on record'
By Adam Sage
June 05, 2006
Times Online
A DRAWING discovered by a potholer on the wall of a cave in the west of France appears to be the oldest known portrait of a human face.
The 27,000-year-old work was found by a local pensioner, Gérard Jourdy, in the Vilhonneur grotto near Angoulême.
Drawn with calcium carbonate, and using the bumps in the wall to give form to the face, it features two horizontal lines for the eyes, another for the mouth and a vertical line for the nose. "The portrait of this face is unique," said Jean Airvaux, a researcher at the French Directorate of Cultural Affairs. "We have other drawings, but they are more recent. Here, it could be the oldest representation of a human face."
Archaeologists are particularly interested in the Vilhonneur cave because there are several drawings, including one of a hand in cobalt blue, along with animal and human remains.
Jean-François Baratin, the regional director of archaeology in western France, said that there were only two known examples of prehistoric caves from this era containing both bones and drawings. The other is at Cussac in the Dordogne.
The discovery was made by M Jourdy in November, but kept secret until February while the site was sealed. The results of a scientific analysis were made public on Friday.
M Baratin said ribs, a thigh bone and a tibia taken from the floor of the cave had been dated by scientists in Miami, as were the drawings. These turned out to be about 11,000 years older than the renowned paintings at Lascaux in the nearby Dordogne.Michel Boutant, chairman of the local Charente department council, said: 'The face reminded me of a Modigliani portrait."
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UFOlogisit Karl Pflock Passes Away
Paul Kimball
The Other Side of Truth
6 June 06
I just received very sad news from Brad Sparks that Karl Pflock, whom I was happy to count as friend these past couple of years (I first interviewed him back in September, 2001), and whom I respected greatly, passed away at 3:16 P.M.Mountain Time on June 5, 2006, at his home in Placitas, New Mexico. As most know, Karl had been battling ALS.
This is a great loss for ufology, and for those who knew Karl.
My most heartfelt and sincere condolences to his family.
Rest in peace, Karl.
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Jupiter's Red Spots Are Nearing Each Other
Universe Today
05 Jun 2006
Jupiter's well known Great Red Spot storm, and its newly formed Oval BA (aka Red Jr.) are about to sweep past each other, and astronomers aren't quite sure what's going to happen. The storms probably won't merge or tear each other apart, but their outer bands will rub against each other. Oval BA recently turned red, signifying its larger size and strength compared to the smaller white storms on Jupiter. Some astronomers think the encounter with the Great Red Spot will slow it down again, returning it to white.
The two biggest storms in the solar system are about to go bump in the night, in plain view of backyard telescopes.
Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The behemoth has been spinning around Jupiter for hundreds of years.
Storm #2 is Oval BA, also known as "Red Jr.," a youngster of a storm only six years old. Compared to the Great Red Spot, Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin.
The two are converging. Closest approach: the 4th of July, according to Amy Simon-Miller of the Goddard Space Flight Center who has been monitoring the storms using the Hubble Space Telescope.
"There won't be a head-on collision," she says. "The Great Red Spot is not going to 'eat' Oval BA or anything like that." But the storms' outer bands will pass quite close to one another-and no one knows exactly what will happen.
Amateur astronomers are already monitoring the event. Christopher Go of the Philippines took the picture above using his 11-inch telescope on May 28th. "The distance between the storms is shrinking visibly every night," he says.
Similar encounters have happened before, notes JPL's Glenn Or ton, a colleague of Simon-Miller. "Oval BA and the Great Red Spot pass each other approximately every two years." Previous encounters in 2002 and 2004 were anti-climatic. Aside from some "roughing" around the edges, both storms survived apparently unaltered.
This time might be different. Simon-Miller and Orton think Red Jr. could lose its red color, ironically, by passing too close to the Great Red Spot.
Red Jr./Oval BA wasn't always red. For five years, 2000 to 2005, the storm was pure white like many other small "white ovals" circling the planet. In 2006 astronomers noticed a change: a red vortex formed inside the storm, the same color as the powerful Great Red Spot. This was a sign, researchers believed, that Oval BA was intensifying.
The color of the Great Red Spot itself is a mystery. A popular theory holds that the storm dredges up material from deep inside Jupiter's atmosphere, lifting it above the highest clouds where solar ultraviolet rays turn "chromophores" (color-changing compounds) red. A beefed-up Oval BA could suddenly do the same.
Bumping up against the Great Red Spot, however, could weaken Oval BA, turning it white again. Simon-Miller explains: "We believe the Great Red Spot will push Oval BA toward a southern jet stream, which is blowing against the oval's counterclockwise rotation." This would slow Oval BA's spin, possibly reversing the process that reddened it in the first place.
What will actually happen? "We'll see," she says. That's what telescopes are for.
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UFO expert, Physicist, Dr. Harley Rutledge, 80, dies
TJ GREANEY
Southeast Missourian
June 6, 2006
In 1980 he published "Project Identification," which took a scientific approach to cataloguing UFO activity.
Dr. Harley Rutledge, 80, former chairman of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University and UFO expert, died Monday at the Missouri Veterans Home.
Rutledge first joined the physics department at the university in 1963. He was department chairman there from 1964 to 1982. He retired from teaching in 1992.
Rutledge first gained national notoriety through an organization he launched in 1973 called "Project Identification." The project was a response to a flurry of UFO sightings near Piedmont, Mo. Over the next six years, Rutledge and crews of students, scientists and amateur enthusiasts spent 150 nights scanning the skies in Franklin County with cameras, audio recorders, telescopes and tools measuring electromagnetic field disturbances. The efforts were funded in part by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
In 1980 he published a book also called "Project Identification," which took a scientific approach to cataloguing the UFO activity. He tracked the velocity, distance and size of the objects he caught on video and said he was careful not to let his own hypotheses get in the way of the data.
"I don't want to scare anyone and the one way not to do that is by trying to explain these phenomena," said Rutledge in 1979.
"I treat reports of UFOs like bottles of medicine without labels. I can't use the medicine without the label, but I can put it on the shelf until I get a label for it."
In 1989, Rutledge claimed to have seen 164 UFOs during his life. At the end of this research he claimed to have 700 photographs of UFOs either taken by him personally or by associates.
His fame as a passionate investigator of the unexplained led him to be a featured expert on CNN and quoted in a Time-Life book on UFOs and an astrology textbook. He was also a lively interview subject featured on the radio talkshow circuit.
His unfulfilled dream, though, was to come face to face with an extraterrestrial.
"I've seen just about everything there is to see, but I haven't seen one of those little creatures," he said in an interview in 1988.
Dr. Art Soellner, a friend and colleague in the physics department, remembered Rutledge's ability to simplify complex science.
"What I remember most was that he was a very good teacher," said Soellner. "He had a way of working with the students that stood out. I had an office behind his classroom, and he was teaching a physical science general education course, which usually means a lot of students aren't too interested. But he got them involved and I could often hear he got good chuckles out of them."
Soellner also recalled that Rutledge was integral in building up the physics department at the university from a faculty of four when he was first hired to nine when he left.
During the past three years Rutledge had been suffering from Alzheimers. He is survived by his wife, Ruth. They were married for 52 years and have five children.
tgreaney@semissourian.com
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Researchers find hidden Greek text on 'world's oldest astronomy computer'
PhysOrg.com
6 June 06
The size of a shoebox, a mysterious bronze device scooped out of a Roman-era shipwreck at the dawn of the 20th century has baffled scientists for years. Now a British researcher has stunningly established it as the world's oldest surviving astronomy computer.
A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say.
"Part of the text on the machine, over 1,000 characters, had already been deciphered, but we have succeeded in doubling this total," said physician Yiannis Bitsakis, part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from universities in Athens, Salonika and Cardiff, the Athens National Archaeological Museum and the Hewlett-Packard company.
"We have now deciphered 95 percent of the text," he told AFP.
Scooped out of a Roman shipwreck located in 1900 by sponge divers near the southern Greek island of Antikythera, and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the Mechanism contains over 30 bronze wheels and dials, and is covered in astronomical inscriptions.
Probably operated by crank, it survives in three main pieces and some smaller fragments.
"(The device) could calculate the position of certain stars, at least the Sun and Moon, and perhaps predict astronomical phenomena," said astrophysicist Xenophon Moussas of Athens University.
"It was probably rare, if not unique," he added.
The rarity of the Antikythera Mechanism precluded its removal from the museum, so an eight-tonne 'body scanner' had to be assembled on-site for the privately-funded project, which used three-dimensional tomography to expose the unseen inscriptions.
The first appraisal of the Mechanism's purpose was put forward in the 1960s by British science historian Derek Price, but the scientists' latest discovery raises more questions.
"It is a puzzle concerning astronomical and mathematical knowledge in antiquity," said Moussas. "The Mechanism could actually rewrite certain chapters in this area."
"The challenge is to place this device into a scientific context, as it comes almost out of nowhere... and flies in the face of established theory that considers the ancient Greeks were lacking in applied technical knowledge," adds Bitsakis, also of Athens University.
The researchers are also looking at the broader remains of the Roman ship -- believed to have sunk around 80 BC -- for clues to the Mechanism's origin.
One theory under examination is that the device was created in an academy founded by the ancient Stoic philosopher Poseidonios on the Greek island of Rhodes.
The writings of 1st-century AD Roman orator and philosopher Cicero -- himself a former student of Poseidonios -- cite a device with similarities to the Mechanism.
"Like Alexandria, Rhodes was a great centre of astronomy at the time," said Moussas. "The boat where the device was discovered could have been part of a convoy to Rome, bearing treasure looted from the island for the purpose of a triumph parade staged by Julius Caesar."
The new findings are to be discussed at an international congress (www.antikythera-mechanism.gr) scheduled to be held in Athens in November.
© 2006 AFP
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Farmer drove three miles with severed hand
Ananova
A farmer who accidentally sliced off his hand packed it in his lunchbox, climbed in his tractor and drove three miles home.
His wife put the severed hand in the fridge and it was later successfully reattached by surgeons in hospital.
Austrian Gerhard Frank, 64, had been using an automatic log splitter in a field three miles from his farm in the village of Steeg.
It sliced down unexpectedly, severing his handm, but Mr Frank had the presence of mind to put it in his refrigerated lunchbox.
A spokesman at Innsbruck Hospital in Austria where the severed limb was successfully reattached said that Frank acted with "remarkable calm and good sense".
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Why the mind is life's greatest mystery
Susan Blackmore
Independent
07 June 2006
Why do we dream? Do we all see a blue sky, or is your blue someone else's orange? Despite extensive research, we can't understand consciousness.
The central mystery has fascinated philosophers for thousands of years; that the universe seems to contain two completely different kinds of thing. On the one hand are bodies and brains - physical objects that we can touch and measure; on the other are conscious experiences - private and subjective feelings that we cannot get at directly. We can ask people what they are experiencing, record their words, and measure what happens in their brains, but somehow this doesn't seem to capture the "what it's like" of subjective experience.
Right now, for me, the sky is a very faint pale blue streaked with early morning wisps of delicate pink. But how can science measure this? We can't even tell whether you and I are having the same experience when we both say we are seeing blue. My pale blue might be your bright orange. This "what it's like for me", is what philosophers call "qualia"; the intrinsic properties of the experiences themselves. So the mystery is this - how can a few pounds of living neurons inside a skull create qualia? No one knows.
No one knows, but at least now they are arguing about it. When I started my research, more than 30 years ago, no serious scientist would even admit to an interest in consciousness, and I was very much on my own. I had had many strange experiences and was obsessed with trying to understand them, but the science simply wasn't there to do the job. Then, gradually, I found I was in the midst of a hot topic. Brain scanning and other advances in neuroscience meant we could at last peek inside a living brain, but how could we find consciousness there?
The problem got me hooked, and so I gave up my university job to read all I could on the subject and write a textbook; a project that left me well informed but even more baffled. Everyone seemed to disagree. So I decided that I needed to ask the experts what they meant - face to face. I travelled the world talking to some of the world's finest thinkers and put together a book, Conversations on Consciousness.
Perhaps the key thinker in this debate is the young Australian philosopher David Chalmers. I caught up with him in Tucson Arizona where, for many years, he has organised the famous "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conferences. He said that scientists researching vision, memory, thinking or emotions were just tackling "easy problems". Even if they solved all those there would still be something else left to explain - consciousness itself - and this he called the "hard problem".
The phrase stuck, and now Chalmers's hard problem has become something of a Holy Grail for consciousness studies. Scientists and philosophers are falling over themselves to become the one who solves the hard problem. The trouble is, no one knows how to set about solving it.
At one extreme are those who think a revolution in physics is the answer. The Tucson anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff is one such theorist. "Every day," he told me, "I put patients to sleep and wake them up and it's still incredible. You wonder - where do they go?" He has teamed up with the British mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose, to argue that the brain is a quantum computer and the conscious self depends on quantum effects in the microtubules - tiny tubular structures inside every cell of the body. They are convinced that this is the way forward, but no one else I talked to shared their enthusiasm.
Far more common are the neuroscientists who think that if we just get on with the "easy problems" we will eventually solve the hard one. Pre-eminent among these is the late Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Aged 60 and after nearly half a century of work in biology, he changed tack totally - turning his attention from the mystery of heredity to that of consciousness.
Shortly before his death from cancer in 2004, an 88-year-old Crick invited me to his home in Southern California. Within minutes, he was demanding that I come up with a crucial experiment. When I tried my best, he dismissed it out of hand. "All that's nonsense," he said, "because it's based on pure psychology and you're not talking about neurons."
Crick had no time for the speculations of psychologists or philosophers - all they do is argue, he said, and never make discoveries. He was convinced that what we need to do is put the hard problem aside and get on with studying the neural correlates of consciousness; that is, measure what is going on inside the brain when a person has a conscious experience. In this light, he looked for the consciousness neurons - the parts in the brain that are active when someone has a conscious experience.
He likens the hard problem to an ancient conundrum - the nature of life itself. Back in the 19th century, biologists were convinced that they would find a special "life force" that breathed life into plants and animals and departed at their death. Of course, no such force was ever found, Crick himself contributing to its demise. The answer turned out to be that when you understand how living things work, you realise they don't need any special force at all. Could the same be true for consciousness?
Pat and Paul Churchland certainly think so, and the pair, who are both professors of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, take a strong line on Chalmers and his hard problem. "I don't see how you can tell, by looking at a problem, how difficult it is," says Pat. "There are many examples where people thought a problem was unsolvable, and turned out to be wrong." For the Churchlands, there is no "mystery of consciousness". For them, when we grasp how the brain's visual system processes colour information, the problem of qualia will be solved.
The most extreme view, however, is posited by Tufts University professor, Daniel Dennett.In his book Consciousness Explained, he denies the existence of qualia and says that there is no such thing as "consciousness itself". Dennett believes that if we start from our intuitions about consciousness then we are doomed to failure. For example, he argues, some people may feel as though they have a little conscious self somewhere inside their head, which is the subject of the stream of experiences. He believes that the brain possesses no central controller; no inner screen where the images could appear; and no one inside to experience them. There is no magic process that somehow turns ordinary nerve activity into conscious experiences. We must, he told me, throw out all of these perfectly natural, but misguided ways of thinking about consciousness.
But how? Turning your intuitions inside out is terribly hard, but if Dennett is right then most of the others I spoke to are completely wrong. Quantum physics will not help one jot, and no one will ever find Crick's "consciousness neurons".
I would love to pop into the Tardis, jump forward a few years, and see who turns out to be right. For now at least, consciousness looks set to remain one of our greatest mysteries.
Susan Blackmore will be speaking about 'Conversations on Consciousness' on Saturday 10 June at the Cheltenham Science Festival (www.cheltenhamfestivals.com; 01242 227 979)
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Gawd, I'm drowning in footwear!
Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God to Save Him
Reuters
5 June 06
KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.
"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.
"A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."
The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an "animal island" protected by thick concrete blocks.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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Officials faulted for not singing karaoke: It's Business Etiquette in Vietnam
Reuters
7 June 06
HANOI - In Vietnam, where karaoke is not only recreational but also business etiquette, failing to show your talent can cost you dearly.
Tien Phong (Pioneer) newspaper reported Wednesday that state oil monopoly Petrovietnam's financial arm PVFC ordered 21 officials to make "self-criticism" reports for not singing karaoke at a contract-signing ceremony near Hanoi Saturday.
At least eight department heads were facing suspension, said the newspaper, which also published a letter by the group of officials protesting the decision as unlawful.
"We all thought we had completed our company obligation and contributed to the success of the ceremony," the letter said. "We were only thinking of our family back in Hanoi, the kids and the wives waiting."
A company official said, "No one has been laid off yet but they have to criticize themselves for not participating in collective activities."
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Google.com blocked as vice tightens on Chinese Internet users
Reporters Without Borders
7 June 06
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the current unprecedented level of Internet filtering in China, which means the Google.com search engine can no longer be accessed in most provinces - although the censored Chinese version, Google.cn, is still accessible - and software designed in the United States to get round censorship now only works with great difficulty.
The organisation also deplored the fact that the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June has been used to tighten the vice on Chinese Internet users.
"It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January," Reporters Without Borders said. "Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China. It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content."
Internet users in many major Chinese cities have had difficulty in connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week. The search engine was totally unaccessible throughout the country on 31 May. The blocking then gradually extended to Google News and Google Mail. So the Chinese public is now reduced to using the censored Chinese versions of these services.
At the same time, the authorities have largely managed to neutralise software designed to sidestep censorship since 24 May. Such software as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate and Garden Networks is normally used by about 100,000 people in China to gain access to news and information that is blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of the worldwide web.
Bill Xia, the US-based exile who created Dynapass, said the jamming of these programmes had reached an unprecedented level and he was convinced the authorities were deploying considerable hardware and software resources to achieve it.
Software engineers based abroad have been trying to update these programmes on the basis of information they have received from Internet users inside China. A new version of Dynapass was released a few days ago, but its effectiveness is still extremely limited.
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Cleric linked to Bali bombing to be freed within days
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:34:22 EDT
CBC News
An Indonesian militant cleric jailed in connection with a 2002 Bali bombing will be free in a week, said a top Indonesian official.
Indonesia's Justice and Human Rights Minister Hamid Awaluddin said Tuesday that Abu Bakar Bashir, 68, would be released on June 14.
Bashir has served 26 months of a 30-month sentence after being convicted of conspiracy in the nightclub bombing that killed 202 people, including two Canadians.
Several months were cut from his sentence for good behaviour.
The Muslim cleric is reportedly the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the militant organization that is believed to have been behind the bombing and several others in Indonesia. The group is believed to have links to al-Qaeda.
Bashir was arrested a week after an explosives-packed van detonated outside the nightclub on the Indonesian island on Oct. 12, 2002. He was jailed for immigration offences.
He was later released and rearrested on charges of conspiracy.
Bashir's lawyers have said that once released, he intends to return to his Islamic boarding school in central Java.
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Crime-scene students find dead man at "mock" crime scene
Reuters
7 June 06
MIAMI - A group of Florida criminology students working a fake crime scene stumbled across a real corpse on a field trip to study forensics.
The St. Thomas Aquinas High School students were taken to a Fort Lauderdale park on Monday to look for clues at a mock crime scene where the instructor had planted phony "evidence."
"The students went up to this one area ... and found a man with his back against the wall and he looked dead. They thought it was part of the skit," Fort Lauderdale Police detective Kathy Collins said.
There was no sign of foul play and the 45-year-old homeless man appeared to have died of natural causes, she said.
It may not have been a murder, but the discovery of the dead man may have persuaded one teen-ager that crime-scene investigation is not his life's work.
"I don't really think I could take finding any more dead bodies, especially if it was rotting," Juan Cantor, 15, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.
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Three-armed boy surgery 'success'
BBC
6 June 2006
A two-month-old boy born with two left arms has successfully undergone surgery to remove one of them, doctors in Shanghai say.
Neither arm was fully functional and doctors decided to remove the one closest to his chest after tests revealed it was less developed.
Doctors say the boy, Jie-jie, will require long-term physical therapy to build strength in his remaining arm.
The operation took place on Tuesday at the Shanghai Children's Medical Centre.
Dr Chen Bochang, head of the orthopaedics department at Shanghai Children's Medical Centre, said the operation had been "very successful".
"He is now a pretty good condition, although he still needs some time under observation," he said.
Uncertain case
Jie-jie was born on 1 April at a small hospital in Anhui Province.
He is reported to have just one kidney, and may have problems that could lead to curvature of the spine.
When either of his left arms was touched, Jie-jie would cry, but he smiles and responds normally to other stimuli.
Before the surgery, doctors were unsure as to how to approach the operation.
Dr Chen said his case was "quite peculiar".
"We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm."
Dr Chen's hospital is one of China's most experienced in dealing with unusual birth defects, including separating conjoined twins.
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Is that one hand in your pocket or are you...
Storm surges threaten US economic heartlands - New Orleans and Sacramento Sinking into the Sea
NewScientist.com news service
Patrick Barry
05 June 2006
THE next time a Katrina-like hurricane strikes, it could be the Big Apple, not the Big Easy, that finds itself underwater. The New York area hasn't experienced a hurricane since 1985, and Manhattan a direct hit since the 1800s. Yet forecasters say because we're midway through a roughly 25-year cycle of warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, conditions are ripe for a major hurricane to hit the north-east coast of the US within the next few years.
"The east coast, and the north-east in particular, is overdue for a hurricane statistically," says Michael Wyllie, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Upton, New York. "Since we haven't had [a hurricane in New York] for a while, [the population] has become complacent. They don't believe that something like that can happen here."
When hurricanes strike, the low pressure and high winds drive a dome of water, called a storm surge, onto land. If a major hurricane struck close to New York City, the storm surge could raise the local sea level by 8 metres, swamping the financial district in lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, as well as areas of Jersey City. The subway, some road and rail tunnels, and La Guardia and John F. Kennedy airports would be flooded. In total, more than 250 square kilometres could be affected, forcing 2.2 million people to evacuate in New York City alone.
"Our basic philosophy is that there's very little we are going to be able to do to stop the surge. What we want to do is to minimise the damage that's going to occur," says Maryann Marrocolo, assistant commissioner for planning for the New York City Office of Emergency Management. So city officials are focusing on raising public awareness, fortifying infrastructure, and planning evacuation and recovery efforts.
Yet some scientists say a storm surge could be held back. By building rotating flood barriers as much as 1.6 kilometres long and rising at least 8 metres above the normal high-water level, it may be possible to spare much of the city. Physical oceanographer Malcolm Bowman and his colleagues at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, have proposed a plan to build four such barriers at key locations around Upper New York Bay (see Map). Three barriers would shelter most of the upper bay, including Manhattan. The fourth, with the aid of some sea walls, would protect Jamaica Bay and Kennedy airport. Bowman says they would keep the water out of half the area vulnerable to flooding, including Manhattan, Jersey City and parts of Brooklyn.
It would be an enormous undertaking. "This is on the scale of the Hoover dam," Bowman says. The barriers would be akin to the one on the river Thames, downstream from central London, that protects the city from flooding by exceptionally high tides. The 523-metre-long Thames barrier, completed in 1982, took eight years and £1.3 billion to build, but it is dwarfed by Bowman's plan. Each of the four New York barriers would span up to 1.6 kilometres, and estimates of the possible cost start at tens of billions of dollars.
Even this huge price tag need not rule the project out. The damage from a severe hurricane ploughing through Manhattan could amount to as much as $300 billion, according to estimates based on simulations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not counting indirect impacts on the nation's economy.
The response to Bowman's proposal has, however, been lukewarm. "That's so far beyond the scope of what we can accomplish," Marrocolo says. The Regional Plan Association, an organisation of political leaders in 31 counties in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, held its annual strategy meeting for the region last month, but Jennifer Cox, RPA's director of geography programmes, says that discussion at the meeting involved no firm plans to build such a structure.
The fact that the barriers would protect some people but not others doesn't help with the politics of such an expensive, publicly funded project. The southern shores of Brooklyn and Staten Island would remain vulnerable, as would the often battered southern coast of Long Island. Some scientists raise other objections. An inherent problem, says Klaus Jacob, a senior research scientist at Columbia University in New York City, who analysed Bowman's proposal for the New York Academy of Sciences, is that sooner or later a storm big enough to swamp the barriers will come along. If people forgo other safety measures because they feel protected by the barriers, it could lead to an even bigger calamity.
Even if no one is ready to start building, all levels of government continue to fund research on the ideas. Bowman plans to apply for an upcoming grant of around $3 million from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which he would use to conduct preliminary engineering studies for the barriers.
If other cities' experiences are any guide, it would take a major flood for people to rally behind a barrier system. In London, the trigger was a calamitous flood in 1953, and even then construction of the Thames barrier didn't begin for 21 years. For New York, a flood is looking increasingly likely. Sea levels in the area have been rising more than 2 centimetres per decade due to the tilting and settling of the land mass after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. And climate change is predicted to make the increase in sea level accelerate. The higher the sea level, the less potent a storm would have to be to cause a catastrophic flood.
The Gulf Coast
The coast of Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, and saving it will be "one of the top five engineering projects of this century", says environmental engineer Vincent Neary of Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville.
Flood-control structures have for years starved the delta of vital new sediment, allowing encroachment by the sea. Then hurricane Katrina came along and did 50 years of damage in a couple of nights, converting 189 square kilometres of wetlands east of the Mississippi to open water. That's more than the 155 square kilometres previously expected to be lost by 2050.
To stem the loss, engineers must resupply the wetlands with sediment without obstructing river navigation and exacerbating the flood risk. Past plans have failed as a result of politics, lack of funds and competing priorities, says Charles Groat, a former director of the US Geological Survey. For example, when Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was still 12 years from completing flood protection structures for New Orleans that were planned after hurricane Betsy in 1965.
This week, a group of scientists led by Denise Reed, a geologist at the University of New Orleans, has been presenting its ideas to Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. Neary says sediment-laden water could be diverted from the Mississippi south of New Orleans. This month, the Corps of Engineers will also deliver a new plan.
Flood-proofing New Orleans and the coast might cost anything up to $100 billion, and whether either plan will get the go-ahead remains in doubt. One reason for this can be found in a scathing report on past plans, published last week by the independent levee investigation team headed by Raymond Seed of the University of California, Berkeley: "Flood control for developed urban areas comes in last [because] it doesn't make money for anyone."
Jeff Hecht
Sacramento Valley
"There are two kinds of levees: those that have failed and those that will." It is an adage that Sacramento would do well to heed, as California's capital city is reckoned by experts to be in greater danger of flooding than New Orleans was before Katrina.
Much of the city lies below the flood level of the Sacramento river, and is protected only by ageing levees of uncertain strength. In the path of any floods lie 250,000 people and 140,000 structures. Potential damage is estimated at $25 billion. Beyond the city, the river runs 120 kilometres through a flat delta of farmland to San Francisco Bay. The Sacramento river and the San Joaquin that joins it also provide drinking water for 23 million Californians and irrigation for farms that produce half the nation's fruit and vegetables. The ground in the delta has subsided up to 8 metres below sea level, and the tidal rivers are held above the land by massive dirt levees. If those levees failed, the salty San Francisco Bay water could pour deep into the delta, contaminating the water supply and causing $40 billion in damage.
The state of California has been slowly bolstering Sacramento's levees over the past two decades, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has allocated $500 million for the 4000 kilometres of levees in Sacramento and the delta in next year's proposed budget. The state is also beginning to modify the Folsom dam above Sacramento to stem storm flows more effectively, but that would still leave the area with a relatively low flood protection compared with other cities in the country, says Rod Mayer, California's flood-control chief. Improving the delta levees, which are vulnerable to damage by earthquake, could cost another $10 billion. Meanwhile, sea levels are rising, the land continues to subside, and houses keep being built behind the levees as California's population increases.
Julie Rehmeyer, San Francisco
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 05 June 2006, page 8
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Euro Down Against U.S. Dollar
The Associated Press
June 7, 2006
BERLIN - The 12-nation euro was down slightly Wednesday against the U.S. dollar, which continued to be supported by comments from U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that have raised expectations of another interest rate hike in Washington.
In morning European trading, the euro bought US$1.2790, down from US$1.2834 in New York on Tuesday. The British pound slipped to US$1.8573 from US$1.8608 in New York, while the dollar rose to purchase 113.40 Japanese yen from 113.14 the day before.
Bernanke said Monday that inflation had reached levels at or above the range the Fed deems comfortable, raising expectations for a rate hike at the Fed's policy meeting at the end of June.
The central bank has raised rates 16 consecutive times since June 2004, which has helped to bolster the dollar. Higher rates can strengthen a currency by providing higher rates of returns on certain types of investment.
The European Central Bank is also widely expected to raise interest rates by at least a quarter of a percent to 2.75 percent when it meets Thursday in Madrid, Spain.
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Chinese shares tumble by 5.33%, biggest fall in 4 years
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 15:16:23
BEIJING, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Chinese shares closed 5.33 percent lower on Wednesday, the biggest daily fall in four years, as investors dumped shares for profit-taking over concerns for a possible interest rate hike.
The Composite Stock Index on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which comprises yuan-denominated A shares and foreign-currency B shares, closed at 1,589.55 points, down by 89.58 points, or 5.33 percent.
The drop of the index, the biggest daily dive since Jan. 28, 2002, when it tumbled by 91.93 points, or 6.33 percent.
Analysts attributed the drastic fall to profit-taking by investors amid worries over interest rate hike by China's central bank.
The continuous drastic falls on overseas stock markets in recent days were also a contributing factor, they said.
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US, South Korea Kick Off Trade Talks Amid Protests
By Doug Palmer
Reuters
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - The United States and South Korea kicked off talks on Monday on the biggest U.S. free trade agreement in more than 12 years, as South Korean farmers and labor activists vowed to do what they could to stop it.
Chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Cutler said the two sides would focus this week on relatively non-controversial issues - what she called "low-hanging fruit" - and save more difficult topics like rice, automobiles and the treatment of products made in a North Korean industrial park for later rounds.
Negotiators are pushing for a deal by January so Congress can vote on it before the expiration of White House authority to negotiate trade agreements that cannot be amended. That authority expires in mid-2007.
The KorUS Free Trade Agreement would be the biggest U.S. free trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Congress approved in 1993.
South Korea is the world's 10th-largest economy and the United States' seventh-largest trading partner, with two-way goods trade totaling about $72 billion last year. But South Korea has a much more protected market than the United States.
About 45 South Korean farmers, union members and other activists have travelled to Washington to protest the talks, but Cutler said she remained "optimistic about our ability to conclude a high-quality, comprehensive agreement."
"The political will is clearly there on both sides," Cutler told reporters as the protesters banged drums and chanted anti-FTA (free trade agreement) slogans outside the U.S. Trade Representative's office. "Both sides are entering into the negotiations with their eyes wide open," she said.
Cutler told reporters Washington would not ask Seoul to open its market to more American films as part of the pact. South Korea already made a significant concession by reducing the number of days theaters must show domestic films to 73 from 146, which goes into effect in July, she said.
However, Cutler criticized new South Korean rules that would make it harder for big U.S. drug companies to compete in the market. The United States wants those overturned and even greater access as part of the pact, she said.
Protests Planned
South Korean activists have said that opening the South Korean market to more U.S. goods and services by tearing down high tariffs and other barriers would endanger the livelihood of 15 million South Korean workers and 3.5 million farmers.
Opponents of trade liberalization in South Korea have a reputation for violent protests, such as at a World Trade Organization meeting in December in Hong Kong, where they clashed repeatedly with police.
Oh Jongryul, co-chair of the Korean Alliance Against the KORUS FTA, told reporters they planned only "peaceful and legal actions" this week in Washington.
Those include daily rallies outside the U.S. Trade Representative's office, a candlelight vigil in a park across from the White House and a meeting with sympathetic lawmakers in Congress, organizers said.
South Korean labor unions and farmers will hold a general strike and huge street protest on July 12 - when the second round of negotiations will be underway in Seoul - in an effort to persuade the South Korean government "to stop the KORUS talks," said Kim Taeil, general secretary of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.
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Norway dumps Wal-Mart from $240 billion investment fund
By John Acher, Reuters
OSLO - Norway said on Tuesday that its $240-billion oil fund would no longer invest in Wal-Mart (WMT), the world's biggest retailer, because of what it called "serious and systematic" abuses of human and labor rights.
Norway's government also excluded shares in mining group Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold (FCX) from the fund - one of the world's biggest pension funds - for environmental reasons.
The fund sold its holdings in both firms, which had been worth about $430 million at the end of 2005 - most of it in Wal-Mart stock - by the end of last month, the finance ministry said.
"These companies are excluded because, in view of their practices, investing in them entails an unacceptable risk that the fund may be complicit in serious, systematic or gross violations of norms," Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said.
The move raised the number of companies excluded from the fund for what Oslo calls ethical reasons to 19. Norway has previously ejected companies involved in producing anti-personnel land mines, cluster bombs or nuclear weapons.
The Finance Ministry based the exclusions on the recommendations of the fund's ethical council.
"The recommendation to exclude Wal-Mart cites serious/systematic violations of human rights and labour rights," the finance ministry said. "The recommendation to exclude Freeport is based on serious environmental damage."
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman declined to comment. Freeport-McMoRan's spokesman said the company rejects the allegations and they are based on a misunderstanding.
The ministry said the council had found "an extensive body of material" that indicated Wal-Mart had broken norms, including employing minors against international rules, allowing hazardous working conditions at many of its suppliers and blocking workers' efforts to form unions.
It also listed other alleged Wal-Mart abuses including pressuring workers to work overtime without compensation, discriminating against women in pay and blocking "all attempts to unionise".
It said Wal-Mart employees were "in a number of cases unreasonably punished and locked in".
The council's report encompassed Wal-Mart's operations in the United States and Canada and its suppliers in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, Malawi, Madagascar, Swaziland, Bangladesh, China and Indonesia.
The finance ministry said Norway's central bank, which manages the investment fund, had invited Wal-Mart to comment on the allegations in September, but the company did not respond.
Halvorsen said Norway might provide an example to other investors in the way it exercises ownership rights.
"It is of great value that others see what we do," Halvorsen, who also leads the Socialist Left party, told a news conference.
The ministry blamed Freeport-McMoRan for using a natural river system to dispose of tailings from a huge copper mine on the island of New Guinea in Indonesia. "The Council on Ethics finds that the environmental damage caused by the mining operations is extensive, long-term and irreversible," it said.
Freeport-McMoRan's spokesman Bill Collier said the tailings were not toxic. "They did contact us," he said of the fund's managers, Norway's central bank. "We furnished them with our information, but we feel this reflects a misunderstanding."
Collier said Freeport conducts comprehensive monitoring of the water in the river and the area where the tailings are deposited, including sediment, plant species and aquatic organisms. "And it has never detected a problem," he said.
The fund had held about 2.5 billion Norwegian crowns ($416 million) worth of Wal-Mart securities at the end of the 2005, and its holdings in Freeport-McMorRan were worth about 116 million crowns, the ministry said. All were sold by the end of May.
The Government Pension Fund - Global, which invests surplus oil wealth in foreign stocks and bonds, was worth 1.48 trillion Norwegian crowns ($246.2 billion) at the end of March.
Contributing: Carole Vaporean in New York, Jessica Wohl in Chicago and Joergen Frich in Oslo.
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Do not read this Chain! Stop!
Fire in the sky: A bright fireball that blazed over the Northland on Friday night
BY STEVE KUCHERA
Duluth NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
7 June 06
The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada.
"Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime," Scott Young said.
Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which traveled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday.
"We have a couple hundred e-mails, and my receptionist is taking phone calls as quick as they come in," Young said. "I'm sure thousands of people saw it, because it went right over our cottage country area."
Using information from witnesses and the mathematical process of triangulation, the museum hopes to determine the fireball's exact path.
"That intersects the ground at some point, and that's where you go look for pieces," Young said.
If the museum is able to triangulate the fireball's path, it will publish the results so residents can look for its remains. Young believes it likely that parts of the fireball survived their fiery plunge.
"There was a sonic boom heard over the Lake of the Woods area, and that generally means that it has penetrated very low into the atmosphere," he said. "If it does that, then generally pieces can survive."
According to NASA, as many as 4 billion meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day, many at speeds about 45 miles per second. Friction with the air causes them to glow. Most meteors are just specks of dust that burn up in a brilliant streak of light.
Fireballs are different. They can weigh pounds -- large enough to illuminate a long path through the sky. Some fireballs, called bolides, explode with a loud, thunderous sound.
Friday's fireball broke into several pieces, witnesses said.
"It broke up into two pieces -- one big ball and one little ball," said Tim Leseman of Eveleth.
Many people who saw Friday's fireball compared it to fireworks traveling horizontally rather than vertically. From any spot, it was visible for as long as 15 seconds.
"Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been enough time for anyone to take a picture," Young said.
The fireball was seen from places as far afield as Brandon, Manitoba (more than 100 miles west of Winnipeg), northwestern Lake of the Woods (where it appeared to pass directly overhead), Orr, Eveleth, Duluth, the Lake Mille Lacs area and Danbury, Wis.
"Everyone generally thinks it was just over the trees or just over the hills, but when a meteor like this is actually visible, it's usually 20 to 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles) above the Earth," Young said. "It's way, way up there."
A meteor's chemical makeup and temperature determine what color its glow will be. Many witnesses described Friday's fireball as being green or bluish-green in color (common for a stony meteor), turning to red near the end of its flight.
Chris Magney of Duluth saw the fireball as he walked in the University of Minnesota Duluth area.
"I just looked up, and right there in front of me I saw what looked like a firework," he said. "It was giving off some kind of trail. It wasn't an evenly spaced trail. It was kind of sparking off parts. It looked to be kind of bluish-green."
The fireball was larger than past meteors he's seen.
"This was probably one-eighth or one-tenth the size of the moon -- much larger than any background star," he said. "Just because of the light intensity it must have been pretty hot, whatever it was. It was moving as fast as the shooting stars I've seen."
He watched as it appeared to follow an arc, vanishing over the northwestern horizon.
Leseman was letting his dog out when he happened to look up to the west as the fireball blazed past. It was in sight for perhaps 10 seconds.
"It was the size of the moon and it was moving slowly from south to north," he said. "It was very bright with a long tail, and it looked like it was rolling as if it was burning up.... I got a huge chill watching it."
STEVE KUCHERA can be reached at (218) 279-5503, toll free at (800) 456-8282, or by e-mail at skuchera@duluthnews.com.
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Java quake may have volcanic effect
From New Scientist Print Edition
01 June 2006
The earthquake last weekend on the Indonesian island of Java, which killed thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless, may be about to trigger a second disaster. The Volcanological Survey of Indonesia says that volcanic activity on nearby Mount Merapi has tripled since the quake.
Merapi has been giving cause for concern over the last 10 years and in recent weeks the Indonesian government has ordered evacuation for people living on the mountain slopes.
There is normally thought to be no direct relationship between earthquakes and volcanoes, but it is possible for one to influence the other. "The earthquake epicentre was relatively close to Merapi, only around 50 kilometres away, so it is possible that the seismic activity did something to the magmatic plumbing system," says Brian Baptie, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. "It is partially due to the kind of volcano it is. The lava dome is easily destabilised, with bits collapsing and forming pyroclastic flows."
Although unusual, earthquakes have spurred a volcano into action before, including a sequence of eruptions in Alaska triggered by seismic waves from the Indian Ocean quake on 26 December 2004.
Before the 27 May quake, the volcano was burping clouds of hot ash and gas about 50 times a day. By the next day the number had risen to more than 150, prompting fears that a major eruption could hit the region already devastated by the quake.
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 01 June 2006, page 4
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Volcano Erupts in Southern Japan
June 7, 2006, 6:09AM
TOKYO - A volcano erupted in southern Japan on Wednesday, blowing ash about 3,000 feet into the air, the Weather Agency said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Mount Sakurajima erupted at 5:30 p.m. and registered as moderate on the agency's scale for both the sound and strength of the tremors it caused, the agency said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The 3,700-foot Sakurajima is one of Japan's most active volcanoes. Clouds of ash constantly drift from its crater. It sits in Kagoshima Bay, about 590 miles southwest of Tokyo.
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Indonesia's Mount Merapi spews hot lava
Yahoo News
7 June 06
MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia - Hot gas and molten lava from Mount Merapi forced the evacuation of 3,000 people Wednesday, amid warnings that a large eruption at Indonesia's most dangerous volcano was still possible.
"It has the potential to spew bigger hot clouds," said Subandriyo, a vulcanologist monitoring Merapi's peak, adding that scorching ash and debris shot nearly two miles down the mountain's flank on nine separate occasions Wednesday.
The volcano's lava dome has swelled in recent weeks, raising concerns that it could suddenly collapse and send scalding clouds of gas and debris into populated areas.
Some scientists say a powerful May 27 earthquake that killed more than 5,700 people in area only 25 miles south of Merapi may have contributed to the increased activity at the volcano.
Subandriyo said the mountain appeared a little calmer than on Monday and Tuesday, but that it was still in a state of flux.
Indonesia's disaster management office said 3,000 people were evacuated Wednesday, bringing the number who left since the alert level was raised to its highest level three weeks ago to nearly 23,000.
Weary Indonesian refugees living in a camp near the mountain said they desperately wanted to return home but fears of a new lava burst and searing volcanic gas have kept them away.
"A hot gas cloud is one of our worst nightmares," said Teguh Rahardjo, 64, recalling how a large eruption in 1994 killed 60 people and decimated houses, fields and animals. About 1,300 people were killed when it erupted in 1930.
An elderly woman who uses the single name Sontani said that after 36 days in the camp, she wants to go home but is afraid her village will be destroyed.
"I saw many big stones, some as big as my house, come down from the crater to our village," Sontani said. "I'm very afraid and prefer to stay here."
Puji Pujiono, leader of the
United Nations disaster assessment and coordination team at the site, said 3,500 people living near the base were evacuated this week, many taken in trucks and cars to temporary shelters. Thousands living nearer to the peak had already been relocated.
Pujiono said a U.N. helicopter was to fly over the 9,800 foot peak later Wednesday, and that a status report would be filed later in the evening, but he did not think the mountain was any more dangerous than it was three weeks ago.
Indonesia is located on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," a string of volcanoes and fault lines that encircle the Pacific Basin. It has 76 volcanoes, the largest number of any nation.
In southern Japan, meanwhile, Mount Sakurajima erupted Wednesday and sent a plume of smoke about 3,300 feet into the air, the country's Weather Agency said, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The eruption registered as moderate on the agency's scale for both the sound and the strength of the tremors it caused.
There was no other significant change in volcanic activity, the bulletin said. "We do not believe that a large-scale eruption is imminent," said agency official Akira Otani.
Authorities in the area have received no immediate reports of damage or injuries, according to police official Shoichi Araki in Kagoshima, across the bay from the volcano. Ash has been falling in the city for several days, he added.
The 3,686-foot Sakurajima is one of the most active of Japan's 108 volcanoes. It sits in Kagoshima Bay, about 590 miles southwest of Tokyo.
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Chupacabra Sightings Reported in Central Russia
MosNews
27 April 06
For the first time in history, the mysterious Puerto-Rican Chupacabra vampire has been spotted in Russia.
Reports of a beast that kills animals and sucks on their blood came from a village in Central Russia back in March 2005, when a farm had 32 turkeys killed overnight. The beast left the corpses bloodless, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said.
Then reports came from neighboring villages, where more than 30 sheep and goats fell victim to the vampire. Again, the blood had been drained from corpses but the flesh remained intact. All the slaughtered animals had similar puncture wounds on their necks, different from the marks that wolves, dogs or lynx leave on their victims.
Finally, eyewitness descriptions match the traditional description of the Chupacabra, said to resemble a kangaroo and a dog with huge teeth.
"I heard the sheep bleating loudly, and when I approached the barn I saw a black shadow, like a big dog standing on its hind legs. It leaped like a kangaroo - when it spotted me it ran away," says Yerbulat Isbasov, 18, who guards sheep in the village of Gavrilovka.
Yerbulat saw the beast again in a few days' time, and described it as a 1.2 meter high animal with a hump on its back.
Alfia Makasheva saw a whole pack of vampires in her yard.
"One was a huge reddish thing, another was dark grey, and they were being followed by a pack of pups. In the middle of the yard the red one turned its head and got up on the hind legs, as if it was thinking."
When Dmitry Madinovsky from Orenburg heard about the beast, he suggested it could be the legendary Chupakabra, and set off to look for it. In the woods near the Sakmara river he discovered two rows of tracks that could belong to an animal of some 35 kilos in weight. The tracks were of five-toed paws with claws and webbed fingers, and a tail that dragged between them. Zoologists could not identify the animal from photos of the prints.
"It is definitely a Chupakabra! Small front and big hind legs," Madinovsky says. "The animal first walked on all fours, near the water it got up on its hind legs, raised its tail and leapt away like a kangaroo."
This May Madinovsky and the Urals Anomaly Monitoring Station experts are determined to track the animal down.
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South Africa: Meteorite crashes through windscreen of car
Auto Express
World News
7 June 06
Driver Rick Wirth's escape when a stone crashed through his screen on a road in Minneapolis left him thanking his lucky stars. The rock was a meteorite from space.
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Miss Kool A. Neos
Why water freezes faster after heating
NewScientist.com news service
Marcus Chown
03 June 2006
A common chemical process may explain a bizarre property of water that has been a mystery since the time of Aristotle - how hot water can freeze more quickly than cold.
This strange and counter-intuitive effect was first observed by the ancient Greek philosopher and was made famous in recent times by a Tanzanian school student called Erasto Mpemba. He noticed that the sugared milk he was using to make ice cream froze more quickly if it started out hot. But what is behind the so-called "Mpemba effect"?
According to Jonathan Katz of the Washington University in St Louis, it's all to do with solutes. "You have to ask yourself: what does heating do to water that makes it easier to freeze?" he says. "The answer is that it precipitates out solutes."
The solutes Katz has in mind are calcium and magnesium bicarbonate, which make most drinking water "hard". When the water is heated, these precipitate out to form the solid scale that "furs" up the inside of a kettle.
Water that has never been heated still contains these solutes. As it freezes, ice crystals form, and the concentration of solutes in the remaining water becomes ever higher - up to 50 times as high as normal. This lowers the freezing point of the water, just like salt sprinkled on a road in winter. "The water therefore has to cool further before it freezes," says Katz.
There is a second, related effect that hampers the freezing of water that has never been heated. The lowering of the freezing point reduces the temperature difference between the liquid and its freezing surroundings. "Since the rate at which heat is lost from the water depends on this temperature difference, water that has not been heated has greater difficulty losing heat," Katz says.
Katz claims that the two effects combined can perfectly explain why water that has been heated freezes more quickly than water that hasn't. And he makes a prediction that experiments should be able to verify: that the Mpemba effect should be more marked the "harder" the water. "This may explain why not everyone sees it," he says. "Some people are using soft water."
"Katz's analysis of the Mpemba effect is deeper and more rigorous than anything else on the subject," says Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley. "He has come up with a simple yet - I believe - correct way to look at a complex phenomenon."
Katz, who worked out the details of the Mpemba effect while adjudicating a student exam, is waiting for someone to do the experiment to test his theory. "It's not difficult but it's not trivial either," he says. "I think it would take a couple of months to do it right."
From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 03 June 2006, page 10
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Police arrest 67 in child porn crackdown across Europe
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 11:56:07
MADRID, June 6 (Xinhua) -- Police conducted crackdowns in five European countries and arrested 67 people in a simultaneous operation against child pornography, Spanish police said on Tuesday.
In a statement, police said 38 people had been detained in France, 10 in Spain, nine in Slovakia, seven in Belgium and three in the Netherlands. Officers from the International Police (Interpol) took part in the operation alongside local forces.
The suspects were charged with owning and distributing child pornography via the Internet, police said.
In Spain, police searched several cities for the 10 suspects.
"All the people who were operating in our country had a high level of knowledge of information technology and a high level of education. They included several university professors," the police said.
Police were investigating a further 57 suspects in 28 countries, according to the statement.
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Brin says Google compromised principles
By TED BRIDIS
Associated Press
Jun 6,2006
WASHINGTON - Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.
Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google's rivals accommodated the same demands - which Brin described as "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with" - without international criticism, he said.
"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said.
Brin also addressed Internet users' expectations of privacy in an era of increased government surveillance, saying Americans misunderstand the limited safeguards of their personal electronic information.
"I think it's interesting that the expectations of people with respect to what happens to their data seems to be different than what is actually happening," he said.
Google has battled the U.S. Justice Department in court seeking to limit the amount of information the government can get about users' Internet searches. It also says it has not participated in any programs with the National Security Agency to collect Internet communications without warrants.
Google's free e-mail service is among the Internet's most popular.
Brin visited Washington to ask U.S. senators to approve a plan that would prevent telephone and cable companies from collecting premium fees from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for faster delivery of their services. Brin, dressed casually in jeans, sneakers and a black sport jacket, said he wasn't sure whether he changed any lawmakers' minds.
Google's China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.
"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that Google's main Web site, http://www.google.com, was no longer accessible in most Chinese provinces due to censorship efforts, and that it was completely inaccessible throughout China on May 31.
Brin said Google is trying to improve its censored search service, Google.cn, before deciding whether to reverse course. He said virtually all the company's customers in China use the non-censored service.
"It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path," Brin said. "It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing."
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Italian forces to leave Iraq by December
Staff and agencies
June 7, 2006
The new Italian administration today confirmed all Italian troops would withdraw from Iraq by the end of the year.
Italy's foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, said the government would start reducing the number of troops in Iraq this month and the Italian military presence in Iraq would end by December.
He said: "We believe the Italian military mission in Iraq is moving towards its end. During the coming months, military forces will return to their country.
"We think that by the end of this year the Italian military mission will end in Iraq."
It is the first time a minister from the newly elected centre-left government has given a timetable for the pullout of Italy's 2,700 troops. The Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, was recently elected on a platform of withdrawing troops from Iraq swiftly but until today his government had not discussed timing.
The previous government, under the staunch US ally Silvio Berlusconi, also had vowed to complete the pullout by the year's end. Speaking during a visit to Baghdad to discuss the plans with Iraqi leaders, Mr D'Alema said: "We have a voters' mandate: the troops are coming back home."
Mr D'Alema met with his Iraqi counterpart, the foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, shortly after his arrival in Baghdad, and was scheduled to meet the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, the foreign ministry in Rome said.
Mr Zebari said the Iraqis would be ready to take over responsibility for the south-eastern area where the Italians are based.
"This withdrawal will not begin suddenly but will be gradual," he said during a joint news conference at the Iraqi foreign ministry. "We have a security plan to transfer the security tasks from the Italian forces to the Iraqi forces starting at the end of this month."
Mr Zebari also plans to meet with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in Washington next week to discuss the withdrawal.
The announcement comes two days after an attack on an Italian military convoy in southern Iraq that killed a soldier and wounded four others. But Mr D'Alema said the pullout was strictly a political decision.
Mr Prodi, who took office last month after elections that ousted Mr Berlusconi, also told parliament on Tuesday that the attack would not speed up the pullout plans.
In the next few weeks, Mr Prodi and his cabinet will devise a more detailed timetable for withdrawal. Some of the more leftwing parties in his broad alliance are pressing for Italy's troops to be back by the summer.
Last month Mr Prodi made it clear he intended to pull out the third-biggest contingent in the military coalition at the earliest possible opportunity.
In his first policy speech since being sworn in, he criticised Anglo-American policy, calling the invasion of Iraq a "grave mistake" and branding the allied military presence an "occupation". The departure of Italian troops from Iraq would further weaken a coalition that has been hostage to anti-war sentiment in Europe as well as financial constraints.
Ukraine withdrew all of its troops from Iraq at the end of last year, and Poland, which was once one of the largest military contributors, has also cut its contingent. Several other smaller forces have also been withdrawn.
The Italian withdrawal is part of an overall reduction in the US-led coalition force planned for this year. The US has announced it will reduce its 140,000-strong force, and Britain, which has the second biggest contingent, is to cut back its 8,500-strong force.
Italian forces have suffered 32 deaths in Iraq. The Italian contingent is based in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles south-east of Baghdad. The Italian troops were sent in by Mr Berlusconi to help rebuild Iraq after the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein.
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Helicopter lands in high-security prison for daring jailbreak!
Reuters
5 June 06
ATHENS - A helicopter landed in the middle of the high security Athens Korydallos prison, picked up two prisoners and flew away in a Hollywood-style escape that has left Greek police stunned.
A criminal on the run hijacked the helicopter Sunday to get his brother out of prison, police said. Vassilis Paleokostas, 40, who was serving a 25-year sentence for kidnapping and bank robbery, and an Albanian convict escaped.
"The guards thought it was a surprise inspection by ministry officials and did nothing," a police official said.
The helicopter pilot, who said he was forced at gunpoint to undertake the mission, flew the inmates to a nearby cemetery and they made their escape on motorbikes. Greek police have launched a manhunt for the convicts.
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Mysterious death stirs fear, suspicion
By THOMAS LAKE
St. Pete Times,Florida
June 7, 2006
An 81-year-old man was found stabbed, thousands of dollars missing. Deputies serve a search warrant, and neighbors point fingers.
SHADY HILLS - Hours after the killing of Gilbert Wood, as detectives pulled clues and women wept, Daniel Boyle stood near the crime scene and spoke ill of the dead.
Everyone else said Wood, 81, was harmless and benevolent. He had no criminal record in Florida. But here was Boyle, his neighbor from across the street, describing Wood's double-wide as a drug-dealing haven.
"Hate to say it," said Boyle, 42, "but he probably got what he f---in' deserved."
On that day, May 26, the comments could have been dismissed as idle slander. But a search warrant that the St. Petersburg Times obtained a copy of on Monday put them in new perspective. The Sheriff's Office said it found what appeared to be bloodstains on the seat of Boyle's silver Toyota pickup, as well as a crescent wrench wrapped in a moist towel that seemed to match a wound on Wood's head.
Boyle remained free Tuesday morning, however, and he told a Times reporter the warrant was meaningless.
"Pasco County sheriff's department," he said, "can kiss my a--."
He said his wrench never struck Wood, and he maintained that tests would show the blood in his truck was his own - a casualty of yard work.
"I'll show you the plant I cut it on," he said, pointing east along his barbed-wire fence. "The damn cactus right there at the end."
Boyle said he served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, and his 1.2-acre Rockledge Avenue compound resembles a fortress. State records show that he has lived in Florida since at least 1989 and has never been charged with a crime.
His jungle-like yard brims with bamboo and saw palmetto. Rusty nails point skyward on his fence posts, and a metal gate blocks his driveway. Boyle said the neighborhood is rife with drug dealers. So did his next-door neighbor to the east, Kathleen Jordan, the woman who found Wood's body.
That is one of the few things they agree upon. Jordan told the Times she took Wood to the bank a few days before he died. He withdrew several thousand dollars for a down payment on a new home. When he went to pay Boyle for digging up his palm trees, according to Jordan, Wood accidentally showed him the envelope thick with cash.
Later, according to Jordan, Boyle told her this:
"Man, it'd be so easy to break in the back door and bop him over the head and take it all."
She said she thought he was joking. But on May 26, she found Wood on the floor of his house, covered in stab wounds. The money was gone.
Wood never made it off Rockledge Avenue. But Jordan said she will. She said she is selling her house. She said she is afraid to live next to Boyle. She said his yard is full of booby traps.
She pointed across the fence onto his property, where a homemade wooden watch tower stands in the back yard, crowned with a black flag to commemorate prisoners of war. She said he likes to sit up there, looking down at her swimming pool. She said her husband called Tuesday morning and told her to go somewhere safe.
It was nearly noon when Jordan loaded two young children into a dusty pickup truck and drove west on Rockledge Avenue.
She passed the barbed-wire fence, the blade-sharp vegetation. Boyle was in there somewhere. She did not slow down. The engine roared as she vanished over the hill.
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So many possibilities... for courts
Thomas Walkom
Toronto Star
Jun. 5, 2006
Summary: Suppose, just suppose, that one or more of the 17 charged yesterday with terrorism is innocent.
This is not the common assumption. I suspect most Canadians assume that Ontario was in great danger from terrorists, that police nipped this danger in the bud and that all of the 12 adults and five young people they arrested are guilty.
That's one possibility. It's certainly the explanation favoured by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who yesterday praised the police.
Another is that this is a reprise of the infamous 2003 Project Thread fiasco, in which RCMP and immigration officials accused 23 Muslims of terrorism only to acknowledge later that at most the men were guilty of minor immigration fraud.
Suppose, just suppose, that one or more of the 17 charged yesterday with terrorism is innocent.
This is not the common assumption. I suspect most Canadians assume that Ontario was in great danger from terrorists, that police nipped this danger in the bud and that all of the 12 adults and five young people they arrested are guilty.
All of which may be true. Terrorists do exist. There is the terror we don't think about, committed by nation states under the rubric of security sweeps or targeted reprisals. And there is the terror we do think about, the terrorism of misguided individuals, loons, right-wing militias or Al Qaeda and its Islamist acolytes.
Militant Islamists have committed outrages in the United States, Indonesia, Spain and Britain to counter what they see as the crimes of these countries against Muslims. There is no obvious reason to assume that similar criminals won't try the same thing here.
All of which is to say that the Mounties may be absolutely correct when they say they stopped the 17 from using homemade detonators and three tonnes of fertilizer to blow up as yet unspecified targets in southern Ontario.
There may indeed have been a terrorist conspiracy that involved what the RCMP assistant commissioner Mike McDonell yesterday referred to as "training areas," where militants tramped about in big boots, cooked on outdoor barbecues, built bombs and used a wooden door for target practice.
That's the implication from the evidence shown to reporters yesterday: five pairs of boots in camouflage drab, six flashlights, one set of walkie-talkies, one voltmeter, one knife, eight D-cell batteries, a cellphone, a circuit board, a computer hard drive, one barbecue grill, one set of tongs suitable for turning hot dogs, a wooden door with 21 marks on it and a 9-mm handgun.
Or it is possible that the only thing that these bits of evidence prove is that a group of young men went somewhere where they tramped around in big boots, cooked on barbecues, played soldier and generally acted like jerks - which young men are occasionally wont to do.
The three tonnes of ammonium nitrate allegedly purchased was, as McDonell said, three times the amount used in the Oklahoma terror bombing of 1995.
But, as he also said, farmers routinely buy three tonnes of ammonium nitrate "every day." They use it for fertilizer, not bombs.
In short, we don't know much yet about what these men and boys were trying to do. We don't know if this series of arrests, called Operation O-Sage by the Mounties, pre-empted the kind of actions that in the United Kingdom led to last year's bombing of the London subway by otherwise unremarkable young Britons.
That's one possibility. It's certainly the explanation favoured by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who yesterday praised the police.
Another is that this is a reprise of the infamous 2003 Project Thread fiasco, in which RCMP and immigration officials accused 23 Muslims of terrorism only to acknowledge later that at most the men were guilty of minor immigration fraud.
Still another possibility is that this may turn out to be Canada's version of the 2004 Virginia "paintball" trial, in which one man was sentenced to life and another got 85 years.
In that controversial case (even the presiding judge complained the outcome was unfair), nine Muslim men were convicted of participating in terrorist training - the main evidence being that they had played paintball in the woods outside Washington.
What we do know about Operation O-Sage is that the RCMP, as well as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have been tracking the suspects since 2004. We also know that at least some of their neighbours knew police were watching them. Presumably, some of the suspects did, too.
If the alleged conspirators knew they were under surveillance, it seems odd that they continued along merrily with plans to make explosives.
But perhaps they are not bright terrorists. Or perhaps they are not terrorists at all.
With luck, we will get these answers at trial. This time at least, Canada has chosen to deal with alleged terrorists in the proper way, by charging them with criminal offences and allowing the case to come to court - in Canada.
For too long, the government's preferred option was to let others handle our problems. In 2002, CSIS agents escorted alleged Canadian terrorist Mohamed Mansour Jabarah across the border so he could be arrested by the FBI and convicted in a secret trial. Later that year, the RCMP co-operated with the Americans to have them arrest Canadian suspect Maher Arar in New York (he was later transferred to Syria to be tortured).
Five other alleged terrorists are simply being detained without charge under Canada's very elastic immigration act until they can be deported.
So, in this context, the 2004 decision to charge Canadian Mohammad Momin Khawaja for terrorism and yesterday's unrelated decision to charge the 17 are welcome. At least the accused aren't being sent to Syria.
During the next few days, much will be written and broadcast on the 17. Their lives will be re-examined through the prism of the arrests as reporters try to retrace the steps that allegedly led them to violent jihad. Unnamed security sources will leak details designed to bolster the police case. Families and friends will proclaim the innocence of those charged.
Take it all with a grain of salt. We know that police arrested people. We know they seized some materials - all legal - that can be used to make explosives. So far, we don't know much else.
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