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Editorial: The Mystic vs Hitler

20 October 2006
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Signs of the Times

Recently, the formerly highly respected web essayist, John Kaminski, wrote a new piece entitled "Parasite alert: Outing those who pretend to be friends of the truth" in which he took a strange jab at yours truly as follows:

[...] It's also interesting that Daryl writes about Zionists but agrees with French law that one may not speak about the Holocaust, a colossal act of cowardice that should send people running from his site and should delegitimize anything he says in the minds of anybody who can think. [...]

Another person who falls into this category is channeler Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who has inveigled many with her prescient psychological pronouncements that it is a percentage of psychopaths that hold the world in thrall through savagery. K-J's encyclopedic and endlessly perfect papers about aspects of human behavior scare the shit out of me, because her new science of ponerology could serve perfectly as a new template for totalitarianism, to be imposed by the very people who get to fund spooky think tanks like these.

Thankfully, she has not caught on in any of the groups I observe working on the world's problems. [See our Forum Thread for the entire essay]

John is right: understanding what is really going on here on the BBM has not caught on in any of the groups he observes "working on the world's problems." We can also note that none of these groups seem to be making any progress because the very science that could help them to understand the first level of what they need to solve before anything can ever get done "scares the shite" out of them.

Now, why would that be?

It's an interesting question, and I want to share a story about someone else who was working on solving the world's problems at another time and place in history, similar to our present day, in order to make a particular point. I want to talk about Frtiz Gerlich's Bloody Spectacles.

Now, before I get to Fritz, let me first say a few words about David Irving. In my previous blogpost, I discussed the truly scary idea that is taking hold in many anti-Zionist circles that, because the Zionists seem to be at the root of the world's problems today, that Hitler must have been a good guy because he saw the Jews as being at the root of all the world's ills then. David Irving seems to be one of the ringleaders of this idea.

I recently read an interview with Irving where he says that the "defining moment" for him was when he had penetrated the "inner circle" of the people who had been close to Hitler and he realized that they were all "well-educated, nice and decent". So, of course, if all these well-educated, nice people with deep thoughts and insights thought Hitler was a good guy, then of course, he must be!

Irving was caught in the psychopath's trap just like all the people in Hitler's inner circle were caught... .

He's not the first, either. Nor will he be the last. In fact, it's almost epidemic nowadays. I won't belabor the point; those of you familiar with the problem know exactly what I'm talking about. What is problematical is what this "conviction" has driven Irving to do: cherry pick and spin data. More than that, it has driven him to emulate his hero in certain respects. About the people who support him, Irving has been recorded to say:

"I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites."

He then asserts that he's only using these "cracked anti-Semites" cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can find more respectable forums:

"If I've been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I'm standing on at present. I'm not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions." [Interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler, 1998, Random House]

The history of psychopaths having followers who worship the ground  they walk on is legion. Manipulation is the key to the psychopath's conquests. Initially, the psychopath will feign false emotions to create empathy, and many of them study the tricks that can be employed by the empathy technique. Psychopaths are often able to incite pity from people because they seem like "lost  souls" as Guggenbuhl-Craig writes. So the pity factor is one reason why victims often fall for these "poor" people. Martha Stout, who has studied these types of people and manipulations in great deal, writes about the "pity play" in her book The Sociopath Next Door:

"The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy...

"More than admiration -- more even than fear -- pity from good people is carte blanche.... Pity and sympathy are forces for good when they are reactions to deserving people who have fallen on misfortune. But when these sentiments are wrestled out of us by the undeserving, by people whose behavior is consistently anti-social, this is a sure sign that something is wrong, a potentially useful danger signal that we often overlook."

Robert Hare, who has devoted his career to the study of psychopathy, cites a famous case where a psychopath was "Man of the Year" and  president of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town. (Remember that John Wayne Gacy was running for Jaycee President at the very time of his first  murder conviction!) The man in question had claimed to have a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He ran for a position on the school board which he then planned to  parlay into a position on the county commission which paid more. At some point, a local reporter suddenly had the idea to check up on the guy  - to see if his credentials were real. What the reporter found out was that the only thing that was true about this up and coming politician's "faked  bio" was the place and date of birth. Everything else was fictitious. Not only was the man a complete impostor, he had a long history of antisocial behavior, fraud, impersonation, and imprisonment. His only contact with a  university was a series of extension courses by mail that he took while in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. What is even more amazing is the fact that  before he was a con-man, he was a "con-boy." For two decades he had dodged his way across America one step ahead of those he had hoodwinked. Along the way he had married three women and had four children, and he didn't even know what had happened to them. And now, he was on a roll! But darn that  pesky reporter!

When he was exposed, he was completely unconcerned. "These trusting people will stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people," he said. Amazingly, he was right. Far from being outraged at the fact that they had all been completely deceived and lied to from top to bottom, the local community he had conned so completely to accrue benefits and honors to  himself that he had not earned, rushed to his support! I kid you not! And it wasn't just "token support." The local Republican party chairman wrote about him: "I assess his genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln." As Hare dryly notes, this dimwit was easily swayed by words, and was blind to deeds. And that seems to have been the case with the "intellectuals" associated with Hitler. 

So, of course, having decided that Hitler had to be a nice guy because all these nice, well-educated people said he was, everything Irving has done since then was predicated on his need to cleanse Hitler of any sins. The fact is, Hitler was a lying, evil psychopath who murdered millions upon millions of decent human beings, a large proportion of them being Jews. 

Which brings me to Fritz Gerlich and the Munich Post.

I've often wanted to get my hands on the German newspapers of the time before and after Hitler came to power so as to try to understand what was really going on in Germany at that moment. I wondered if we could we draw any lessons from it for our present time. I've asked many people if they have ever seen any such articles reproduced anywhere, or have they heard of them, and I've always drawn a blank on that question. After all, if we suppose that our present time under the Bush Reich has any similarity to the Third Reich of Hitler, it would be nice to have some concrete material that was written in real time, at the time, on which to base comparisons. As it happens, Ron Rosenbaum was curious about it too but for a different reason. He interviewed a Holocaust survivor who mentioned an article that he remembered from the time, and Rosenbaum went looking for it. He found a lot more than he bargained for. He found Fritz Gerlich and the Munich Post. Rosenbaum calls Fritz and his ilk the "First Explainers."

The heroic anti-Hitler Munich journalists who, from 1920 to 1933 (when many were jailed or murdered) bravely went about the daily task of attempting to tell the world about the strange figure who had arisen from the Munich streets to become leader of a movement that would seize power and inscribe a new chapter in the history of evil.

My fascination with these largely forgotten figures, the reporters who were the first to investigate the political and personal life, the criminality and scandals of Hitler and "the Hitler party," as they astutely called it, began to grow as I first began to pick up echoes and traces of their struggle with Hitler, buried in the footnotes of postwar historains...

My fascination deepened when I came upon a nearly complete collection of flaking and yellowing, seven-decades-old back issues of the anti-Hitler Munich Post, moldering away in the basement of Munich's Monacensia library archives. They've since been transferred to midcrofilm, but there was somthing about communing with the acutal crumbling copies of the newspaper Hitler's party called "the Poison Kitchen," issues in which Hitler was a living figure stalking the pages, that served to give me a painfully immediate intimation of the maddenlying unbearable Cassandra-like frustration the Munich Post journalists must have felt. They were the first to sense the dimensions of Hitler's potential for evil - and to see the way the world ignored the desperate warnings in their work.

As a journalist, I felt simultaneously a growing awe at what they'd accomplished, how much they'd exposed, and how completely they'd been forgotten. Theirs was the first sustained attempt to fathom the depths of the Hitler phenomenon as it began to unfold.... The vision of the First Explainers was the vision of the men and women who were critical witnesses to the now-lost spectacle of Hitler becoming Hitler.

In addition to the courageous reporters and editors of the Munich Post, there were others such as Rudolf Olden, Konrad Heiden, Walter Schaber... and Fritz Gerlich. The iconoclastic editor of a conservative anti-Marxist, anti-Nazi opposition paper called Der Gerade Weg (The Right Way, or Straight Path), celebrated as a journalistic nemesis of Hitler in his time, largely forgotten now. Gerlich was murdered in Dachau for attempting to print a damaging expose of Hitler five weeks after the Nazis had seized power and crushed the rest of the opposition press.

A fascinating figure, Gerlich, a scathing Swiftian satirical scourge of Hitler, he possessed an uncanny insight into the racial dynamics of Hitler's pathology. A skeptical historical scholar, Gerlich nonetheless came to believe in the prophetic powers of a controversial, probably fraudulent, Bavarian stigmatic and found in her a source of the faith that led him to gamble his life on a last-ditch effort to bring Hitler down with his pen and printing press. With and expose to end all exposes of Hitler, he hoped: one final story that would shock the public and cause President Paul von Hindenburg to depose the newly installed Chancellor Hitler before it was too late.

It was a desperate gamble that failed. On March 9, 1933, storm troopers burst into Gerlich's newspaper office, ripped his last story from the presses, beat him senseless, and dragged him off to Dachau, where he was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. The nature of the expose he'd been about to publish - some said it concerned the circumstances of the death of Hitler's half-niece Geli Raubal in his apartment, others said it concerned the truth about the February 1933 Reichstag fire or foreign funding of the Nazis - has been effectively lost to history; it is one of the evidentiary trails I've pursued to the bitter end. ...

I managed to track down in Munich one of Gerlich's last living colleagues, Dr. Johannes Steiner, a retired publisher in his nineties who had been a partner in Gerlich's doomed anti-Hitler attack sheet, Der Gerade Weg. Dr. Steiner's memory of that awful time, particularly the last days of Gerlich, when they were all on the run, was fragmentary. But there was one moment, one memory he'd preserved with frightening clarity for six decades: a memory of the Gestapo and Fritz Gerlich's spectacles. Gerlich's steel-rimmed glasses had become a kind of signature image for the combative newspaperman among those who knew him in Munich, an emblem almost of his steely determination and clarity of vision.

But after a year in Dachau, after the Gestapo had dragged him out of his cell and shot him in the head on the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's thugs chose a cruel and chilling way to notify Gerlich's wife. Dr. Steiner recalled: "They sent to his widow, Sophie, Gerlich's spectacles, all spattered with blood." [Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler]

Rosenbaum sees the cruel gesture as, perhaps, an acknowledgement by Hitler's thugs that Gerlich had seen too much and knew too much, "a token of how much his vision was feared and hated by the Hitler inner circle, for having seen through them."

Now, did you notice anything particularly interesting in the above, brief account of the who, what, when, and where of Fritz Gerlich?

It probably slipped right by, but it was this: "A skeptical historical scholar, Gerlich nonetheless came to believe in the prophetic powers of a controversial, probably fraudulent, Bavarian stigmatic and found in her a source of the faith that led him to gamble his life on a last-ditch effort to bring Hitler down with his pen and printing press."

What is Rosenbaum talking about? A "Bavarian stigmatic"?

Well, before we get to that, let's talk about Fritz Gerlich and "The Trial of Hitler's Nose."

In July of 1932, an extraordinary photocomposite image of Hitler appeared on the front page of one of Munich's leading newspapers. [I have tried, without success, to obtain an image of this issue] The photo showed Hiter in top hat and tails, arm in arm with a black bride in a wedding scene and the headline read: "Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?"

It seems that caricatures of Hitler had appeared in many of the opposition papers and on posters for years, but most of these tended to focus on the mustache and forelock or facial exaggeration. This image struck much closer to home and certainly was Gerlich's death warrant.

To publish an attack as vicious as this one, an attack that was more far reaching and deeply wounding in the body of the text than even the sensational photo and headline would indicate, was an act of great personal courage by a desperate and doomed prophet. In his hitpiece, Gerlich proposes that the reader apply the "racial science" of one of Hitler's favorite racial theorists, Dr. Hans Gunther - who had prescribed the precise shape and dimension of each and every head and facial feature of "the Nordic type" - to Hitler's own head and face, especially to his nose.

With accompanying photographs, Gerlich proceeds to demonstrate that Hitler was not, in fact, Aryan, but was, rather, of the Mongolian type. Gerlich went further in writing a "brilliant critique which resulted in the devastating conclusion that Hitler - by his own lights - not only lacked Aryan physiognomy, he lacked an Aryan soul."

Rosenbaum writes:

[It gave] great satisfaction that at least here, one anti-Hitler journalist had gone all out, had gone for the jugular, had given vent to the anger and contempt that all felt before they were all silenced. I suspect this no-holds-barred fatal recklessness has something to do with my own fascination with Gerlich. It's surprising to discover, when you look at the literature on Hitler and the Nazi leadership before and after the war, inside and outside Germany, how little outright, heartfelt hatred and loathing is expressed in print.

The tone and tendency of prewar explainers was to condescend to Hitler, to treat him as a phenomenon beneath contempt, much less serious consideration. Rather than urge the necessity of combating Hitler, prewar explainers acted as if he could be wished away with words, belittled into oblivion. They diminished him to the point where he was not even a worthy target for antagonism. Postwar literature tends to diminish Hitler in a different way; knowing well what he wrought, the tendency is to argue it wasn't really him, it was the deeper and more profound forces behind and beneath him, the wave on which he rode....

The rare exception to it like Gerlich throws the absence of passion elsewhere into stark relief. ...The reckless yet exquisitely well-honed hatred beneath the surface of Gerlich's satire ...was more than a howl, it was a razor-edged analytic tool that cut to the heart of Hitler's pathology before anyone else did, before it was too late - if anyone had listened. [Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler]

So, Ron Rosenbaum, a Jew, has found a heroic standard bearer in the life and work of Fritz Gerlich; but he has a problem. He says that Gerlich was "driven by his obsession with Hitler from the rational to the irrational..." Why does he see the man who performed such acts of journalistic resistance against Hitler - acts that he admires so much, even right to the end, as "irrational"? The same reason that John Kaminski refers to me pejoratively as a "channeler." It's the problem of the "Bavarian Stigmatic" which I'm getting to; be patient.

Fritz Gerlich was born Protestant and received a doctorate in history at university in Munich. By 1923, he was a respected and influential figure in the nationalist movement and was, therefore, an early supporter of Hitler. However, in the spring of 1923, he received a visitor in his apartment, that rising star of the right-wing nationalist forces, Adolf Hitler himself. No one knows what happened at that meeting, but it seems that something said then, connected with things Hitler did later, turned Gerlich into an implacable foe. Apparently, Gerlich had seen something, the "two faces of Adolf Hitler."

Gerlich formed a close-knit group of colleagues who all worked first at the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, and then later, with Gerlich on his own spinoff anti-Hitler paper, Der Gerade Weg. For ten years, from 1923 until 1933, this group was the most outspoken center of anti-Hitler journalism among conservatives in Germany. The Gerlich group members who escaped arrest in the raid on the paper in March of 1933 went on to become the nucleus of the anti-Hitler movement that culminated in Claus von Stauffenberg's failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July of 1944. As you might guess, at that point, they were executed. We go to Rosenbaum now to learn about Gerlich and Neumann:

But something strange happened to Gerlich and this little group in the late twenties: They forged a highly improbably alliance, one that became a source of the faith that fueled their courageous anti-Hitler campaign. Gerlich and his friends became deeply involved with a holy stigmatic - a highly controversial, probably fraudulent, yet widely worshipped Bavarian woman: Therese Neumann.

It still seems remarkable to me that a skeptical, Protestant, rationalist historian such as Gerlich, the no-nonsense newspaper editor with the gimlet eye behind the steel-rimmed glasses, would be taken in by this primitive, bedridden, Catholic mystic whose own church was skeptical...

One of [Therese's] visitors - an aristocratic Catholic conservative, Count Erwin von Aretin, who survived to become Gerlich's postwar biographer - became a believer....

Finally, after repeated urgings from his colleagues, the skeptical Potestant Gerlich decided to pay a visit to the stigmatic. To the surprise of just about everyone, he came back deeply impressed. More than that, he returned repeatedly, found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the peasant girl's circle, would transcribe her visionary utterances, and translate them into warnings and prophecies about the growing crisis in Germany. ...

Dr. Johannes Steiner, Gerlich's colleague, portrays Gerlich first going to Konnersreuth "determined to unmask every fraud he encountered... If there were any to be found." [Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler]

Yes indeedy, Rosenbaum's hero was hooked up with a real live "channeler." And Rosenbaum, the Jew, simply can't bear it. He goes on for some paragraphs assuring us that Therese Neumann was a fraud, a charlatan, and undoubtedly it was something wrong with Gerlich's mind that led him into this nonsense, never mind that he continued to do excellent work, and was, in fact, among the bravest of those journalists that stood against Hitler. More than this, it seems that the channeler was literally the inspiration for much of Gerlich's work, and Rosenbaum turns impressive cerebral cartwheels trying to talk his way around that!

Now, how can that be?

Rosenbaum can hardly stomach it.

As it happens, it seems that Therese Neumann was NOT a fraud:

Wonder or fake-investigations in the case of the stigmatisation of Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth. Rolf B, Bayer B, Anslinger K. Institute of Legal Medicine, Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universitat, Frauenlobstr. 7 a, 80337, Munich, Germany, Burkhard.Rolf@med.uni-muenchen.de. We investigated two compresses used by Therese Neumann (T.N.), a woman who lived from 1898 until 1962 in Konnersreuth, Germany. The compresses were soaked with blood during the appearance of stigmata on T.N.'s body on a Friday. T.N. became very popular among the faithful in Germany at this time. The question was whether this blood was from T.N. herself or from a family relative or an animal. The comparison of the HV1 and HV2 mtDNA sequence obtained from the compresses with the sequences from a reference sample from a maternally related niece of T.N. revealed an identity. Furthermore, we obtained a short tandem repeat (STR) profile from the bloodstains that were identical with the STR profile from a gummed envelope. The envelope contained a letter written by T.N. in the 1930s. Therefore, our investigations gave no indication for any manipulation.

Now, let's get down to brass tacks here. Those of you that have read Controversy of Zion are aware that Douglas Reed makes the charge that the World Revolution is intended to "destroy Christianity."

I think the issue is much deeper than just the destruction of "Christianity," though that is a useful tag to put on the intention. But let's look at this a bit more deeply. In Controversy of Zion, Reed takes some time to analyze the Protocols of Zion. Now, we all know that the Protocals were a hoax, that they had nothing to do with the Jews, but it is certainly clear to anyone with two neurons firing that there is something mysterious about those Protocols. As a matter of fact, they describe perfectly the situation we see in our world today. But these conditions are not just "Jewish," or even just Zionist; the conditions are created by pathological deviants that infected Judaism and Christianity and Islam. In every area of life, they penetrate every group; they are the bad apples that spoil every barrel. If you have never read the Protocols, now might be a good time to do so, substituting "pathocrat" for "the speakers and "normal people" or "ordinary people" for references to "goyim". You will then understand that we are dealing with individuals with unlimited power, resources, and, it seems, a whole lot more psychological knowledge about human beings than most psychologists and psychiatrists even dream of; specialized knowledge at that. So, let me quote a bit of what Reed had to say about the Protocols because some interesting little tidbits about our theme emerge there:

It is informed by a mass of knowledge (particularly of human weaknesses) which can only have sprung from the accumulated experience and continuing study of centuries, or of ages. It is written in a tone of lofty superiority, as by beings perched on some Olympian pinnacle of sardonic and ancient wisdom, and of mocking scorn for the writhing masses far below ("the mob" . . . "alcoholized animals" . . . "cattle" . . . "bloodthirsty beasts") who vainly struggle to elude the "nippers" which are closing on them; these nippers are "the power of gold" and the brute force of the mob, incited to destroy its only protectors and consequently itself. [Controversy of Zion ]

Andrzej Lobaczewski describes the essential psychopath in a similar way:

In spite of their deficiencies in normal psychological and moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a natural world view. They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them. They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, like a para-specific variety.

Natural human reactions - which often fail to elicit interest to normal people because they are considered self-evident - strike the psychopath as strange and, interesting, and even comical. They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts. They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments. The suffering and injustice they cause inspire no guilt within them, since such reactions from others are simply a result of their being different and apply only to “those other” people they perceive to be not quite conspecific. Neither a normal person nor our natural world view can fully conceive nor properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts.

A researcher into such phenomena can glimpse the deviant knowledge of the psychopath through long-term studies of the personalities of such people, using it with some difficulty, like a foreign language. As we shall see below, such practical skill becomes rather widespread in nations afflicted by that macrosocial pathological phenomenon wherein this anomaly plays the inspiring role. A normal person can learn to speak their conceptual language even somewhat proficiently, but the psychopath is never able to incorporate the world view of a normal person, although they often try to do so all their lives. The product of their efforts is only a role and a mask behind which they hide their deviant reality. [Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes]

The items in the Protocols that relate to my theme of Fritz Gerlich and the Bavarian stigmatic, and how that relates to the pejorative manner in which John Kaminski referred to me as a "channeler" and promoter of knowledge that "scares" him are in the following passage from Reed's book, in bold text:

The resemblance to Weishaupt's documents is very strong in the passages which relate to the infiltration of public departments, professions and parties, for instance:

"It is from us that the all-engulfing terror proceeds. We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines, restorating monarchists, demagogues, socialists, communists, and utopian dreamers of every kind. We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them on his own account is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established form of order. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquility, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness".

The allusions to the permeation of universities in particular, and of education in general, also spring directly from Weishaupt, or from whatever earlier source he received them:

". . . We shall emasculate the universities . . . Their officials and professors will be prepared for their business by detailed secret programmes of action from which they will not with immunity diverge, not by one iota. They will be appointed with especial precaution, and will be so placed as to be wholly dependent upon the Government"

This secret permeation of universities (which was successful in the German ones in Weishaupt's day, as his documents show) was very largely effective in our generation. The two British government officials who after their flight to Moscow were paraded before the international press in 1956 to state that they had been captured by Communism at their universities, were typical products of this method, described by the Protocols early in this century and by Weishaupt in 1787.

Weishaupt's documents speak of Freemasonry as the best "cover" to be used by the agents of the conspiracy. The Protocols allot the function of "cover" to "Liberalism":

"When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony".

The term "utopian dreamers", used more than once, is applied to Liberals, and its original source probably resides in the Old Testamentary allusion to "dreamers of dreams" with "false prophets", are to be put to death. The end of Liberalism, therefore, would be apparent to the student even if the Protocols did not specify it:

"We shall root out liberalism from the important strategic posts of our government on which depends the training of subordinates for our State structure".

The "Big Brother" regimes of our century, are accurately foretold in the passage,

"Our government will have the appearance of a patriarchal paternal guardianship on the part of our ruler".

Republicanism, too, is to be a "cover" for the conspiracy. The Protocols are especially contemptuous of republicanism, in which (and in liberalism) they see the weapon of self-destruction forged out of "the mob":

". . . then it was that the era of republics became possible of realization; and then it was that we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government, by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves. This was the foundation of the mine which we have laid under the peoples".

Then the unknown scribes of some time before 1905 describe the position to which American presidents have been reduced in our century. The passage begins, "In the near future we shall establish the responsibility of presidents".

This, as the sequence shows, means personal responsibility, as distinct from responsibility curbed by constitutional controls; the president is to become one of the "premier-dictators" earlier foreseen, whose function is to be to break down the constitutional defences of states and thus prepare "unification under our sovereign rule".

During the First and Second World Wars the American presidents did in fact become "premier-dictators" in this sense, claiming that "the emergency" and the need for "victory" dictated this seizure of powers of personal responsibility; powers which would be restored to "the people" when "the emergency" was past. Readers of sufficient years will recall how inconceivable this appeared before it happened and how passively it was accepted in the event. The passage then continues:

"The chamber of deputies will provide cover for, will protect, will elect presidents, but we shall take from it the right to propose new, or make changes in existing laws, for this right will be given by us to the responsible president, a puppet in our hands. . .

Independently of this we shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need. . . It is easy to understand that in these conditions the key of the shrine will lie in our hands. and that no one outside ourselves will any longer direct the force of legislation. . .

The president will. at our discretion, interpret the sense of such of the existing laws as admit of various interpretation; he will further annul them when we indicate to him the necessity to do so, besides this, he will have the right to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements for the supreme welfare of the state.

By such measures we shall obtain the power of destroying little by little, step by step, all that at the outset when we enter on our rights, we are compelled to introduce into the constitutions of states to prepare for the transition to an imperceptible abolition of every kind of constitution, and then the time is come to turn every government into our despotism".

This forecast of 1905 or earlier particularly deserves Lord Sydenham's tribute of "deadly accuracy". American presidents in the two wars of this century have acted as here shown. They did take the right of declaring and making war, and it has been used at least once (in Korea) since the Second World War ended; any attempt in Congress or outside to deprive them of this power, or curb them in the use of it meets with violently hostile attack.

So the Protocols continue. The peoples, on their progress "from one disenchantment to another", will not be allowed "a breathing-space". Any country "which dares to oppose us" must be met with war, and any collective opposition with "universal war". The peoples will not be allowed "to contend with sedition" (here is the key to the furious attacks of the 1790's, 1920 and today on all demands for "investigation", "Witch-hunting", "McCarthyism" and the like).

In the Super-State to come the obligation will fall on members of one family to denounce dissident s within the family circle (the Old Testamentary dispensation earlier mentioned). The "complete wrecking of the Christian religion" will not be long delayed. The peoples will be kept distracted by trivial amusements ("people's palaces") from becoming troublesome and asking questions. History will be rewritten for their delusion (another precept since fulfilled in communized Russia), for

"...we shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those which depict all the errors of the national governments".

"All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold".

And the end of it all:

"What we have to get at is that there should be in all the States of the world, beside ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers. . . The recognition of our despot. . . will come when the peoples, utterly wearied by the irregularities and incompetence. . . of their rulers, will clamour: 'Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of discords, frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts, who will give us peace and quiet, which we cannot find under our rulers and representatives' ".

In two or three of these passages I have substituted "people" or "masses" for "Goyim ", because the use of that word relates to the unproven assertion contained in the book's title, and I do not want to confuse the issues; evidence about the identity of the authors of the conspiracy must be sought elsewhere than in an unsupported allegation. The authors may have been Jewish, non-Jewish or anti-Jewish. That is immaterial. When it was published this work was the typescript of a drama which had not been performed; today it has been running for [over] fifty years and its title is The Twentieth Century. The characters depicted in it move on our contemporary stage, play the parts foretold and produce the events foreseen.

Only the denouement remains, fiasco or fulfillment. ... But it has existed for at least 180 years and probably for much longer, and the Protocols provided one more proof in a chain of proofs that has since been greatly lengthened. The conspiracy for world dominion through a world slave state exists and cannot at this stage be abruptly checked or broken off; of the momentum which it has acquired it now must go on to fulfillment or failure. Either will be destructive for a time, and hard for those of the time in which the dénouement comes. [...]

Notice that Reed points out the Old Testamentary allusion to "dreamers of dreams" and "false prophets" being slated for death. Now, let's have a look at an excerpt from another text, Red Symphony, which purports to be a 1938 Stalinist police (NKVD) interrogation of a founder of the Communist International, Christian G. Rakovsky, 65, who was facing execution for plotting to overthrow Stalin.

The 50-page transcript of his interrogation, dubbed "The Red Symphony," was never intended to be made public. It discusses the idea that there is an evil cabal (not necessarily Jewish, but certainly with some Jewish members as well as Gentile - the only qualification seems to be to be a pathological deviant) that plans to use World Revolution to establish a Global dictatorship of the deviants.

The Rakovsky interrogation reveals that the Cabal not only put Hitler in power, they then found that their Frankenstein escaped their control and it was necessary to destroy him.

Christian Rakovsky was a veteran Communist insider. Born Chaim Rakeover in 1873, he studied medicine in France before becoming a revolutionary. He was the leader of a terror group that attacked government officials.

In 1919, Lenin put him in charge of the Soviet Ukraine government. He successfully kept the area for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Stalin appointed him Russian ambassador to Paris in 1925.

Rakovsky belonged to the powerful Trotskyite faction that took their orders from the Rothschilds. Many of this group were shot in Stalin's 1937 Communist Party purge.

So, here is the segment of the interrogation that has an item in it (and I have included a longer excerpt for context) of great significance to my theme:

Rakovsky—Owing to the fact that I was in a hurry I did not express myself quite correctly and you did not understand me well. If it is true that“They” financed Hitler, then that does not mean that they disclosed to him their existence and their aims. The ambassador Warburg presented himself under a false name and Hitler did not even guess his race; he also lied regarding whose representative he was. He told him that he had been sent by the financial circles of Wall Street who were interested in financing the National-Socialist movement with the aim of creating a threat to France, whose governments pursue a financial policy which provokes a crisis in the USA.

G.—And Hitler believed it?

Rakovsky—We do not know. That was not so important, whether he did or did not believe our explanations; our aim was to provoke a war ... and Hitler was war. Do you now understand? [...]

Rakovsky—If I had the time in order to explain their full scheme, then you would already know about the reasons for their approval. At the present moment I shall condense them to three:

G.—Just which ?

Rakovsky—One is that which I had already mentioned.

Hitler, this uneducated and elementary man, has restored thanks to his natural intuition and even against the technical opinion of Schacht, an economic system of a very dangerous kind. Being illiterate in all economic theories and being guided only by necessity he removed, as we had done it in the USSR, the private and international capital. That means that he took over for himself the privilege of manufacturing money, and not only physical moneys, but also financial ones; he took over the untouched machinery of falsification and put it to work for the benefit of the State. He exceeded us, as we, having abolished it in Russia, replaced it merely by this crude apparatus called State Capitalism; this was a very expensive triumph in view of the necessities of pre-revolutionary demagogy...

Here I give you two real facts for comparison. I shall even say that Hitler had been lucky; he had almost no gold and for that reason he was not tempted to create a gold reserve. Insofar as he only possessed a full monetary guarantee of technical equipment and colossal working capacity of the Germans, his “gold reserve” was technical capacity and work ..., something so completely counter-revolutionary that, as you already see, he has by means of magic, as it were, radically eliminated unemployment among more than seven million technicians and workers.

G.—Thanks to increased re-armament.

Rakovsky—What does your re-armament give? If Hitler reached this despite all the bourgeois economists who surround him, then he was quite capable, in the absence of the danger of war, of applying his system also to peaceful production... Are you capable of imagining what would have come of this system if it had infected a number of other States and brought about the creation of a period of autarky... For example the Commonwealth. If you can, then imagine its counter-revolutionary functions...

The danger is not yet inevitable, as we have had luck in that Hitler restored his system not according to some previous theory, but empirically, and he did not make any formulations of a scientific kind. This means that insofar as he did not think in the light of a deductive process based on intelligence, he has no scientific terms or a formulated doctrine; yet there is a hidden danger as at any moment there can appear, as the consequence of deduction, a formula. This is very serious. Much more so that all the external and cruel factors in National-Socialism. We do not attack it in our propaganda as it could happen that through theoretical polemics we would ourselves provoke a formulation and systematization of this so decisive economic doctrine. There is only one solution—war.

G.—And the second motive?

Rakovsky—If the Termidor triumphed in the Soviet revolution then this happened as the result of the existence of the former Russian nationalism. Without such a nationalism bonapartism would have been impossible. And if that happened in Russia, where nationalism was only embryonic in the person of the Tsar, then what obstacles must Marxism meet in the fully developed nationalism of Western Europe? Marx was wrong with respect to the advantages for the success of the revolution. Marxism won not in the most industrialized country, but in Russia, where the proletariat was small. Apart from other reasons our victory here is explained by the fact that in Russia there was no real nationalism, and in other countries it was in its full apogee. You see how it is reborn under this extraordinary power of fascism, and how infectious it is. You can understand that apart from that it can benefit Stalin, the need for the destruction of nationalism is alone worth a war in Europe.

G.—In sum you have set out, Rakovsky, one economic and one political reason. Which is the third?

Rakovsky—That is easy to guess. We have yet another reason, a religious one. Communism cannot be the victor if it will not have suppressed the still living Christianity. History speaks very clearly about this: the permanent revolution required seventeen centuries in order to achieve its first partial victory—by means of the creation of the first split in Christendom. In reality Christianity is our only real enemy, since all the political and economic phenomena in the bourgeois States are only its consequences. Christianity, controlling the individual, is capable of annulling the revolutionary projection of the neutral Soviet or atheistic State by choking it and, as we see it in Russia, things have reached the point of the creation of that spiritual nihilism which is dominant in the ruling masses, which have, nevertheless, remained Christian: this obstacle has not yet been removed during twenty years of Marxism. Let us admit in relation to Stalin that towards religion he was not bonapartistic. We would not have done more than he and would have acted in the same way. And if Stalin had dared, like Napoleon, to cross the Rubikon of Christianity, then his nationalism and counter-revolutionary power would have been increased a thousandfold. [ Red Symphony]

The question is, of course, what kind of Christianity is it necessary to destroy in order to institute a New World Order under Talmudic Judaism? Certainly not what passes for Christianity today. No, it must be some other Christianity, something older, older even than Jesus...

Boris Mouravieff, author of the three volumes Gnosis, remarked about Gurdjieff:

People interested in esoteric matters will probably have read the book by P.D. Ouspensky, published posthumously, titled In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. The ideas in that book were presented to Ouspensky by Georges Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff indicates the basis of his teaching: “for the benefit of those who know already, I will say that, if you like, this is esoteric Christianity.” [Mouravieff, Gnosis]

I would like to note here that the work of Mouravieff provides that ineluctable bridge between the works of Gurdjieff, the Sufi Shaykh, Ibn al-’Arabi, the esoteric Christianity that I have conjectured to have existed during megalithic times and of which we only have ancient Siberian Shamanism as a shadow of a relic, hermeticism/alchemy,  and the Cassiopaean Transmissions - my own "channeling." It should be noted that the Cassiopaeans - us in the future - have definitively supported the existence and work of a man around whom the Jesus legend formed - though they tell us that the story in the Bible that is supposed to be history is a myth - and from the other sources mentioned, we are able to assemble a body of teachings that lends background to this view, as well as supplemental information that elucidates the many clues offered by the Cassiopaeans - us in the future.

This view received unexpected support from New Testament Scholar, Burton Mack, in his book The Lost Gospel. Mack's discussion shows how the Jesus movement was a vigorous social experiment that was generated for reasons other than an "originating event" such as a "religious experience" or the "birth of the son of God."

The Jesus movement seems to have been a response to troubled and difficult times. Mack outlines and describes the times, and shows how the pressures of the milieu led to thinking new thoughts about traditional values and experimenting with associations that crossed ethnic and cultural boundaries. The Jesus movement was composed of novel social notions and lifestyles that denied and rejected traditional systems of honor based on power, wealth, and place in hierarchical social structures. Ancient religious codes of ritual purity, taboos against intercourse across ethnic boundaries, were rejected. People were encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to the larger, human family. Q says: "If you embrace only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?"

The Jesus people not only rejected the old order of things, they were actively at work on the questions of what ideal social order they wanted to manifest and promote. The attraction of the Jesus people to its followers was not at all based on any ideas to reform a religious tradition that had gone wrong, nor was it even thought of as a new religion in any way. It was quite simply a social movement that sought to enhance human values that grew out of an unmanageable world of confusing cultures and social histories. It was a group of like-minded individuals that created a forum for thinking about the world in new ways, coming up with new ideas that included the shocking notion that an ethnically mixed group could form its own kind of community and live by its own rules. Mack writes:

At first no one was in charge of the groups that formed around such teachings. Conversation and mutual support were enough to encourage an individual to act "naturally," as if the normal expectations of acquiescence to social conventions did not apply. As groups formed in support of like-minded individuals, however, loyalty to the Jesus movement strengthened, a social vision for human well-being was generated within the group, and social codes for the movement had to be agreed upon. Why not ask when in need and share what one had when asked, they wondered? Eventually, therefore, the Jesus movement took the form of small groups meeting together as extended families in the heady pursuit of what they called God's kingdom.

To explore human community based on fictive kinship without regard to standard taboos against association based on class, status, gender, or ethnicity would have created quite a stir, and would have been its own reward. Since there was no grand design for actualizing such a vision, different groups settled into practices that varied from one another. Judging from the many forms of community that developed within the Jesus movement, as documented in literature that begins to appear toward the end of the first century, these groups continued to share a basic set of attitudes. They all had a certain critical stance toward the way life was lived in the Greco-Roman world. They all struggled not to be determined by the emptiness of human pursuits in a world of codes they held to be superficial. [...] Despite these agreements, however, every group went its own way and drew different conclusions about what to think and do. [The Lost Gospel by Burton L. Mack]

In addition to reconstructing the times in which the Jesus people lived, Mack presents the Q document itself, showing that it was built up in three layers, each layer being additions made in response to external pressures on the group. What is most interesting is the analysis of the first layer, the one that must be composed of the actual teachings of the man called Jesus. It seems that Jesus' challenge to his followers was to take a deeper look at their world and challenge it in how they lived their lives.

Seven clusters of teachings, or sayings, emerged from the study of Q, and each of these express a coherent set of issues. These sayings comprise a comprehensive set of sage observations that delight in critical comment on the everyday world and unorthodox instructions that recommend unconventional behavior! The ever-present theme of Jesus' teachings was a review of life and conventional values that promoted the idea that customary pretensions are hollow: wealth, learning, possessions, secrets, rank, and power are meaningless in terms of the true value of a human being. Jesus was promoting the idea that the Emperor is naked, though in no way did he propose any idea of changing the system. Implicit in his critique is the idea that there is a better way to live. The challenge was to be able to live without being consumed with worry even if one was fully aware that the world "out there" was a dangerous jungle that required care to navigate.

When fully analyzed and compared with other norms of the time, Jesus emerges as a man living the life of the popular philosophy of the Cynic. This is striking because the Cynics are remembered as distinctly unlovable because they promoted biting sarcasm and public behavior that was designed to call attention to the absurdity of standard conventions. Cynics were:

"...critics of conventional values and oppressive forms of government. [...] Their gifts and graces ranged from the endurance of a life of renunciation in full public view, through the courage to offer social critique in high places, to the learning and sophistication required for the espousal of Cynic views at the highest level of literary composition. Justly famous as irritants to those who lived by the system and enjoyed the blessings of privilege, prosperity, and power, the Cynics were rightly regarded for their achievement in honing the virtue of self-sufficiency in the midst of uncertain times.

The crisp sayings of Jesus in Q show that his followers thought of him as a Cynic-like sage. [...]

These popular philosophers of a natural way of life did not wander off to suffer in silence. Their props were a setup for a little game of gotcha with the citizens of the town. [...] The Cynic's purpose was to point out the disparities sustained by the social system and refuse to let the system put him in his place. [...] The marketplace was the Cynic's platform, the place to display a living example of freedom from social and cultural constraints, and a place from which to address townspeople about the current state of affairs. [...] The challenge for a Cynic was to see the humor in a situation and quickly turn it to advantage. [...]

In our time there is no single social role with which to compare the ancient Cynics. But we do recognize the social critic and take for granted a number of ways in which social and cultural critique are expressed. These compare nicely with various aspects of the Cynic's profession. For example, we are accustomed to the social critique of political cartoonists, standup comedians, and especially of satire in the genre of the cabaret. All of these use humor to make their point. We are also accustomed to social critique in a more serious and philosophical vein, such as that represented by political commentary. And there is precedent for taking up an alternative lifestyle as social protest, from the utopian movement of the nineteenth century, to the counterculture movement of the 1960s, to the environmentalist protest of the 1980s and 1990s. The list could be greatly expanded, for much modern entertainment also sets its scenes against the backdrop of the unexamined taboos and prejudices prevailing in our time. Each of these approaches to critical assessment of our society (satire, commentary, and alternative lifestyle), bears some resemblance to the profession of the Cynic sage in late antiquity. [...]

Noting the Cynic's wit should not divert our attention from their sense of vocation and purpose. Epictetus wrote that the Cynic could be likened to a spy or scout from another world or kingdom, whose assignment was to observe human behavior and render a judgment upon it. The Cynic could also be likened to a physician sent to diagnose and heal a society's ills. [...] The Stoics sometimes claimed the Cynics as their precursors. [...]

[The Cynics] were much more interested in the question of virtue, or how an individual should live given the failure of social and political systems to support what they called a natural way of life. They borrowed freely from any and every popular ethical philosophy, such as that of the Stoics, to get a certain point across. That point was the cost to one's intelligence and integrity if one blindly followed social convention and accepted its customary rationalizations. [...]

What counted most, they said, was a sense of personal worth and integrity. One should not allow others to determine one's worth on the scale of social position. One already possessed all the resources one needed to live sanely and well by virtue of being a human being. Why not be true to the way in which the world actually impinges upon you [objectively]? Say what you want and what you mean. Respond to a situation as you see it in truth, not as the usual proprieties dictate. Do not let the world squeeze you into its mold. Speak up and act out. The invitation was to take courage and swim against the social currents that threatened to overwhelm and silence a person's sense of verve. [...]

The Jesus people are best understood as those who noticed the challenge of the times in Galilee. They took advantage of the mix of peoples to tweak the authorities of any cultural tradition that presumed to set the standard for others. They found a way to encourage one another in the pursuit of sane and simple living. And they developed a discourse that exuded the Cynic spirit. [...]

Beliefs were not a major concern. Behavior was what mattered and the arena for the action was in public. The public sphere was not subjected to a systematic analysis, however, as if society's ills had been traced to this or that particular cause. The social world was under review, to be sure, for the behavior recommended was intentionally non-conventional, mildly disruptive, and implicitly countercultural. But there is no indication that the purpose of this behavior was to change society at large. The way society worked in general was taken for granted, in the sense of "What more can one expect?" Instead, the imperatives were addressed to individuals as if they could live by other rules if they chose to do so. [...] It is important to see that the purpose of the change was not a social reform. The Jesus people were not organizing to fight Roman power or to reform Jewish religion. [The Lost Gospel by Burton L. Mack]

Apparently many responded to the movement and associations of like-minded people began to form. And then, something very interesting happened... Suddenly, in the next layer of Q, a heightened sense of belonging to a movement becomes obvious because injunctions given as aphorisms now become rules supported by arguments. At this point, the idea of the "Kingdom of God" enters the picture. This "Kingdom" was, apparently, a realm or domain in which the rule of God is actualized. The rule of God is what the Q people said they were representing in the world. For the Jesus people, this meant something quite different from what Christians now assume it to mean. First of all, there was nothing at all apocalyptic about it (all that came later). For the Jesus people, the Kingdom of God was compared repeatedly to the natural process of growth as witnessed in Nature. Everything about this "Kingdom of God" was practical, having to do with things that can be accomplished in contrast to the conventional life.

The match between the Cynics and the Jesus people is not exact in all cases because the Jesus people did have an interest in the "Divine" aspect of "God." Unfortunately, there is little in the Q document that explains this Divine source other than the fact that the Jesus people represented it as a "Father", and those who could successfully resist the ruin of social evils were the "children of God." The way the Jesus people referred to God was a bit more serious than the way the Cynics referred to such ideas. The Q people were concerned with the care of their members as a "family." I would suggest that there was a perception of differences in human beings among the Q people, though Mack does not make a special point of analyzing that issue.

The question is, of course, what happened? The document doesn't tell us, though it hints at the nature of the problem by virtue of the additional text that dealt with the issues. There were, obviously, painful experiences that were turned to a lesson. Mack suggests that the formation of Jesus people "families" must have seriously offended certain authorities. He writes:

This concern for loyalty to the movement is matched by signs of social distress. Tensions within the movement are indicated by the saying on scandals and the instruction to forgive a brother if he has a change of heart. But changes of heart have apparently not been the rule. Families have been torn asunder and the divisions have been rationalized as fully in keeping with the importance and purpose of the movement. Painful? Yes, but to be expected.

It seems that families were being split, and ethnic conventions were being personally challenged over loyalty to the movement. The evidence indicates that this occurred in relation to Judaism.

The story of the Beelzebub accusation is about rejection, conflict, and labeling Jesus and his followers as agents of a foreign (Syrian) god. Jesus' retort about "your sons" turns the challenge back upon his questioners and directs the issue of conflict to the social world that Jesus shares with them. There are instructions about what to do in case one is called before the village authorities. [...]

The people of Q2 had not organized their movement to become a society with membership requirements and officers, much less with rites of entrance. But the rule of God that they represented was certainly in the process of being reconceived as a discrete domain or kingdom, and there was now a great deal of talk about "entering into" the kingdom or being excluded from it. [...] Loyalty to the Jesus movement had run up against the challenge of Jewish propriety and the question of belonging to the people of God as the children of Abraham, or Israel. And the Jesus people had taken this challenge seriously. The evidence for this includes the repeated appeals to biblical traditions, the preaching of John about the children of Abraham, the import of the Beelzebub accusation, and the list of counter charges leveled against Pharisees and lawyers. [The Lost Gospel by Burton L. Mack]

Here we find the most fascinating twist of all in the development of Christianity. If the Jesus people had not been attacked by the Jewish authorities, they would not have sought to justify their movement in terms of the Jewish religion. It was only in defense that they did this. They ran afoul of the Pharisaic code, probably because they had Jewish members whose families were horrified at the participation of their children or relatives in the new movement. The issue of loyalty came to be phrased as a "Jewish" question, and the Jesus people felt they had to answer it in Jewish terms.

The charges against the Pharisees and lawyers are especially interesting in this regard. The issues under debate were just what one might expect - washings, giving to charity, tithes, justice, honor, and knowledge. The list combines items typical for the Pharisaic code of ritual purity with items for which scribal representatives of the temple system of courts and taxation would be known. Such standards had apparently been held up as exemplary by families and village leaders seeking to chide their Jesus people into postures of propriety. Apparently the people of Q were not impressed. [...]

True to their Cynic heritage, the Jesus people were still capable of engaging in a bit of caustic riposte. The Pharisees were like tombs (so much for their desire to be honored), and the lawyers treated people like beasts of burden (so much for their claims to know the law and administer justice). [...]

Lo and behold, the people of Q linked the Pharisees and lawyers to the history of what their fathers did to the prophets. ...

That is some ante. ...

It is clear that the offense had registered and that the defense would be to beat the Jewish exemplars at their own game. [The Lost Gospel by Burton L. Mack]

As it happens, Douglas Reed discusses the other side of this issue, the obvious anxiety that the Jews had about Christianity and the steps they took to combat it. In Controversy of Zion, he writes:

The Talmud was essentially the hostile answer to Christianity, the order-of-battle revised in the light of "the enemy's" new dispositions. The lay encyclopaedias (which in our generation have been made untrustworthy on subjects related to Judaism) disguise this fact from Gentile readers. The one now before me, for instance, says, "The Talmud has been attacked by Christians at times - quite unfairly - as anti-Christian". The insertion of two suggestive words by some partisan Scribe causes this volume to purvey demonstrable untruth and to convert a factual statement into a propagandist one. The attack on Christianity gave the Talmud its distinctive tone and is indeed the only new thing in the Talmud. Its other teaching remains that of Ezekiel and the Pharisees.

The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "It is the tendency of Jewish legends in the Talmud, the Midrash" (the sermons in the synagogues) "and in the Life of Jesus Christ (Toledoth Jeshua) that originated in the Middle Ages to belittle the person of Jesus by ascribing to him illegitimate birth, magic and a shameful death". He is generally alluded to as "that anonymous one", "liar", "impostor" or "bastard" (the attribution of bastardy is intended to bring him under The Law as stated in Deuteronomy 23.2: "A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord"). Mention of the name, Jesus, is prohibited in Jewish households.

The work cited by the Jewish Encyclopaedia as having "originated in the Middle Ages" is not merely a discreditable memory of an ancient past, as that allusion might suggest; it is used in Hebrew schools today. It was a rabbinical production of the Talmudic era and repeated all the ritual of mockery of Calvary itself in a different form. Jesus is depicted as the illegitimate son of Mary, a hairdresser's wife, and of a Roman soldier called Panthera. Jesus himself is referred to by a name which might be translated "Joey Virgo". He is shown as being taken by his stepfather to Egypt and there learning sorcery.

The significant thing about this bogus life-story (the only information about Jesus which Jews were supposed to read) is that in it Jesus is not crucified by Romans. After his appearance in Jerusalem and his arrest there as an agitator and a sorcerer he is turned over to the Sanhedrin and spends forty days in the pillory before being stoned and hanged at the Feast of the Passover; this form of death exactly fulfils the Law laid down in Deuteronomy 21.22 and 17.5, whereas crucifixion would not have been in compliance with that Judaic Law. The book then states that in hell he suffers the torture of boiling mud.

The Talmud also refers to Jesus as "Fool", "sorcerer", "profane person", "idolator", "dog", "child of lust" and the like more; the effect of this teaching, over a period of centuries, is shown by the book of the Spanish Jew Mose de Leon, republished in 1880, which speaks of Jesus as a "dead dog" that lies "buried in a dunghill". The original Hebrew texts of these Talmudic allusions appear in Laible's Jesus Christus im Talmud. This scholar says that during the period of the Talmudists hatred of Jesus became "the most national trait of Judaism", that "at the approach of Christianity the Jews were seized ever and again with a fury and hatred that were akin to madness", that "the hatred and scorn of the Jews was always directed in the first place against the person of Jesus" and that "the Jesus-hatred of the Jews is a firmly-established fact, but they want to show it as little as possible". [...]

This vilification of the founder of another religion sets Judaism apart from other creeds and the Talmud from other literature published in the name of religion. Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians, Christians and others do not hate other creeds or their founders as such. They are content to differ and to believe that the paths may one day meet, God deciding the meeting-point.

For instance, the Koran describes Jesus as "strengthened with the Holy Spirit" and the Jews are reproached with rejecting "the Apostle of God", to whom was given "the Evangel with its guidance and light". Of his mother, the Koran says, "O Mary! verily hath God chosen thee and purified thee, and chosen thee above the women of the world", and, "Jesus, the son of Mary, illustrious in this world, and in the next, and one of those who have near access to God".

The central message of the Talmud, the newest "new Law", is plain: it specifically extended the Law to apply to Christianity and left no doubt about the duty of a Jew towards it. ...

[T]he Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "The Talmudists made the Torah into a penal code". For once, in this painstakingly accurate work, the meaning is not quite clear; the Torah already was a penal code (as perusal of it today will show), and its penalties had sometimes been applied (by Ezra and Nehemiah against the Jews; and for that matter by the Romans, at the behest of the Sanhedrin, against the "prophet and dreamer of dreams", Jesus). Possibly the meaning is that, under the Talmudists, the penal code was regularly enforced, and its provisions strengthened. [...]

The command, "destroy", forms the very basis of the Law which the Levites made. If it be deleted, what remains is not "the Mosaic Law", or the same religion, but something different; the imperative, "destroy", is the mark of identity. It must have been deliberately chosen. Many other words could have been used; for instance, conquer, defeat, vanquish, subdue; but destroy was chosen, It was put in the mouth of God, but obviously was the choice of the scribes.

This was the kind of perversion which Jesus attacked: "teaching for doctrine the commandments of men."

Reed has a great deal to say about Jesus and Christianity and the particular mind set that Christianity represents, which deviants of all types seek to destroy:

In few words he swept aside the entire mass of racial politics, which the ruling sect had heaped on the earlier, moral law, and like an excavator revealed again what had been buried. The Pharisees at once recognized a most dangerous "prophet and dreamer of dreams".

The fact that he found so large a following among the Judeans shows that, even if the mass of the people wanted a militant, nationalist Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans, many among them must subconsciously have realised that their true captivity was of the spirit and of the Pharisees, more than of the Romans. Nevertheless, the mass responded mechanically to the Pharisaic politicians' charge that the man was a blasphemer and bogus Messiah.

By this response they bequeathed to all future generations of Jews a tormenting doubt, no less insistent because it must not be uttered (for the name Jesus may not even be mentioned in a pious Jewish home): Did the Messiah appear, only to be rejected by the Jews, and if so, what is their future, under The Law?

What manner of man was this? Another paradox in the story of Zion is that in our generation Christian divines and theologians often insist that "Jesus was a Jew", whereas the Judaist elders refuse to allow this (those Zionist rabbis who occasionally tell political or "interfaith" audiences that Jesus was a Jew are not true exceptions to this rule; they would not make the statement among Jews and seek to produce an effect among their non-Jewish listeners, for political reasons).

This public assertion, "Jesus was a Jew", is always used in our century for political purposes. It is often employed to quell objections to the Zionist influence in international politics or to the Zionist invasion of Palestine, the suggestion being that, as Jesus was a Jew, none ought to object to anything purporting to be done in the name of Jews. The irrelevance is obvious, but mobs are moved by such phrases, and the paradoxical result, once again, is that a statement, most offensive to literal Jews, is most frequently made by non-Jewish politicians and ecclesiastics who seek Jewish favour.

The English abbreviation, "Jew", is recent and does not correspond to anything denoted by the Aramaic, Greek or Roman terms for "Judahite" or "Judean", which were in use during the lifetime of Jesus. In fact, the English noun "Jew" cannot be defined (so that dictionaries, which are scrupulously careful about all other words, are reduced to such obvious absurdities as "A person of Hebrew race"); and the Zionist state has no legal definition of the term (which is natural, because the Torah, which is the Law, exacts pure Judahite descent, and a person of this lineage is hardly to be found in the entire world).

If the statement, "Jesus was a Jew", has meaning therefore, it must apply to the conditions prevailing in his time. In that case it would mean one of three things, or all of them: that Jesus was of the tribe of Judah (therefore Judahite); that he was of Judean domicile (and therefore Judean); that he was religiously "a Jew", if any religion denoted by that term existed in his time.

Race, residence, religion, then.

This book is not the place to argue the question of Jesus' racial descent, and the surprising thing is that Christian divines allow themselves some of the statements which they make. The reader should form his own opinion, if he desires to have one in this question.

The genealogy of Mary is not given in the New Testament, but three passages might imply that she was of Davidic descent; St. Matthew and St. Luke trace the descent of Joseph from David and Judah, but Joseph was not the blood father of Jesus. The Judaist authorities discredit all these references to descent, holding that they were inserted to bring the narrative into line with prophecy.

As to residence, St. John states that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in Judea through the chance that his mother had to go there from Galilee to register; Judaist authorities, again, hold that this was inserted to make the account agree with Micah's prophecy that "a ruler" would "come out of Bethlehem".

The Jewish Encyclopaedia insists that Nazareth was Jesus' native town, and indeed, general agreement exists that he was a Galilean, whatever the chance of his actual birthplace. Galilee, where nearly all his life was spent, was politically entirely separate from Judea, under its own Roman tetrarch, and stood to Judea in the relationship of "a foreign country" (Graetz). Marriage between a Judean and a Galilean was forbidden and even before Jesus’ birth all Judeans living in Galilee had been forced by Simon Tharsi, one of the Maccabean princes, to migrate to Judah.

Thus, the Galileans were racially and politically distinct from the Judeans. [As Burton Mack points out, Jesus probably wasn't a Jew at all; he was probably a Celt.]

Was this Galilean, religiously, what might today be called "a Jew"? The Judaist authorities, of course, deny that most strenuously of all; the statement, often heard from the platform and pulpit, might cause a riot in the synagogue. It is difficult to see what responsible public men can mean when they use the phrase. There was in the time of Jesus no "Jewish" (or even Judahite or Judaist or Judean) religion. There was Jehovahism, and there were the various sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, which disputed violently between themselves and contended, around the temple, for power over the people. They were not only sects, but also political parties, and the most powerful of them were the Pharisees with their "oral traditions" of what God had said to Moses.

If today the Zionists are "the Jews" (and this is the claim accepted by all great Western nations), then the party which in Judea in the time of Jesus corresponded to the Zionists was that of the Pharisees. Jesus brought the whole weight of his attack to bear on these Pharisees. He also rebuked the Sadducees and the scribes, but the Gospels show that he held the Pharisees to be the foe of God and man and that he used an especial scarifying scorn towards them. The things which he singled out for attack, in them and in their creed, are the very things which today's Zionists claim to be the identifying features of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism.

Religiously, Jesus seems beyond doubt to have been the opposite and adversary of all that which would make a literal Jew today or would have made a literal Pharisee then.

None can say with certainty who or what he was, and these suggestive statements by non-Jewish politicians ring as false as the derisive and mocking lampoons about "the bastard" which circulated in the Jewish ghettoes.

What is much more significant, he had known no rabbinical schools or priestly training. His enemies, the Pharisees, testify to that; had he been of their clan or kind they would not have asked, "Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works".

What gives the teaching of this unlettered young man its effect of blinding revelation, the quality of light first discovered, is the black background, of the Levitical Law and the Pharisaic tradition, against which he moved when he went to Judea. Even today the sudden fullness of enlightenment, in the Sermon on the Mount, dazzles the student who has emerged from a critical perusal of the Old Testament; it is as if high noon came at midnight. The Law, when Jesus came to "fulfill" it, had grown into a huge mass of legislation, stifling and lethal in its immense complexity. The Torah was but the start; heaped on it were all the interpretations and commentaries and rabbinical rulings; the elders, like pious silkworms, spun the thread ever further in the effort to catch up in it every conceivable act of man; generations of lawyers had laboured to reach the conclusion that an egg must not be eaten on the Sabbath day if the greater part of it had been laid before a second star was visible in the sky. Already the Law and all the commentaries needed a library to themselves, and a committee of international jurists, called to give an opinion on it, would have required years to sift the accumulated layers.

The unschooled youth from Galilee reached out a finger and thrust aside the entire mass, revealing at once the truth and the heresy. He reduced "all the Law and the Prophets" to the two commandments, Love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself.

This was the exposure and condemnation of the basic heresy which the Levites and Pharisees, in the course of centuries, had woven into the Law.

Leviticus contained the injunction, "Love thy neighbour as thyself", but it was governed by the limitation of "neighbour" to fellow-Judeans. Jesus now reinstated the forgotten, earlier tradition, of neighbourly love irrespective of race or creed; this was clearly what he meant by the words, "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill". He made his meaning plain when he added, "Ye have heard that it hath been said . . . hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemy". (The artful objection is sometimes made that the specific commandment, "Hate thine enemy", nowhere appears in the Old Testament. Jesus’ meaning was clear; the innumerable injunctions to the murder and massacre of neighbours who were not "neighbours", in which the Old Testament abounds, certainly required hatred and enmity).

This was a direct challenge to The Law as the Pharisees represented it, and Jesus carried the challenge further by deliberately refusing to play the part of the nationalist liberator and conqueror of territory for which the prophecies had cast the Messiah. Probably he could have had a much larger following, and possibly the support of the Pharisees, if he had accepted that role.

His rebuke, again, was terse and clear: "My kingdom is not of this world . . . The kingdom of Heaven is within you . . . Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. . . but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Everything he said, in such simple words as these, was a quiet, but direct challenge to the most powerful men of his time and place, and a blow at the foundations of the creed which the sect had built up in the course of centuries.

What the entire Old Testament taught in hundreds of pages, the Sermon on the Mount confuted in a few words. It opposed love to hatred, mercy to vengeance, charity to malice, neighbourliness to segregation, justice to discrimination, affirmation (or reaffirmation) to denial, and life to death. It began (like the "blessings-or-cursings" chapters of Deuteronomy) with blessings, but there the resemblance ended.

Deuteronomy offered material blessings, in the form of territory, loot and slaughter, in return for strict performance of thousands of "statutes and judgments", some of them enjoining murder. The Sermon on the Mount offered no material rewards, but simply taught that moral behaviour, humility, the effort to do right, mercy, purity, peaceableness and fortitude would be blessed for their own sake and receive spiritual reward. Deuteronomy followed its "blessings" with "cursings". The Sermon on the Mount made no threats; it did not require that the transgressor be "stoned to death" or "hanged on a tree", or offer absolution for non-observance at the price of washing the hands in the blood of a heifer. The worst that was to befall the sinner was that he was to be "the least in the kingdom of heaven"; and most that the obedient might expect was to be "called great in the kingdom of heaven".

The young Galilean never taught subservience, only an inner humility, and in one direction he was consistently and constantly scornful: in his attack on the Pharisees.

The name, Pharisees, denoted that they "kept away from persons or things impure". The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "Only in regard to intercourse with the unclean and the unwashed multitude did Jesus differ widely from the Pharisees". Echo may answer, "Only!" This was of course the great cleavage, between the idea of the tribal deity and the idea of the universal god; between the creed of hatred and the teaching of love. The challenge was clear and the Pharisees accepted it at once. They began to bait their traps, in the very manner described by Jeremiah long before: "All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".

The Pharisees watched him and asked, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners" (a penal offence under their Law). He was equally their master in debate and in eluding their baited traps, and answered, swiftly but quietly, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick . . . I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance".

They followed him further and saw his disciples plucking ears of corn to eat on the Sabbath (another offence under the Law), "Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day". They pursued him with such interrogations, always related to the rite, and never to faith or behaviour; "why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders, for they wash not their hands when they eat bread?". "Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophecy of you, saying, this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men".

This was the lie direct: The Law, he charged, was not God's law, but the law of the Levites and Pharisees: "the commandments of men"!

From this moment there could be no compromise, for Jesus turned away from the Pharisees and "called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man".

With these words Jesus cast public scorn on one of the most jealously-guarded of the priestly prerogatives, involving the great mass of dietary laws with the whole ritual of slaughter, draining of blood, rejection of "that which dieth of itself", and so on. All this was undoubtedly a "commandment of man", although attributed to Moses, and strict observance of this dietary ritual was held to be of the highest importance by the Pharisees, Ezekiel (the reader will recall) on being commanded by the Lord to eat excrement "to atone for the iniquities of the people", had pleaded his unfailing observance of the dietary laws and had had his ordeal somewhat mitigated on that account. Even the disciples were apparently so much under the influence of this dietary tradition that they could not understand how "that which cometh out of the mouth" could defile a man, rather than that which went in, and asked for an explanation, remarking that the Pharisees "were offended, after they heard this saying". The simple truth which Jesus then gave them was abominable heresy to the Pharisees: "Do not ye understand, that what whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man; but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man".

This last remark was another penal offence under the Law and the Pharisees began to gather for the kill. They prepared the famous trick questions: "Then went the Pharisees and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk". The two chief questions were, "To whom shall we render tribute?" and "Who then is my neighbour?" A wrong answer to the first would deliver him to punishment by the foreign ruler, Rome. A wrong answer to the second would enable the Pharisees to denounce him to the foreign ruler as an offender against their own Law, and to demand his punishment.

This is the method earlier pictured by Jeremiah and still in use today, in the Twentieth Century. All who have had to do with public debate in our time, know the trick question, carefully prepared beforehand, and the difficulty of answering it on the spur of the moment. Various methods of eluding the trap are known to professional debaters (for instance, to say "No comment", or to reply with another question). To give a complete answer, instead of resorting to such evasions, and in so doing to avoid the trap of incrimination and yet maintain the principle at stake is one of the most difficult things known to man. It demands the highest qualities of quick wittedness, presence of mind and clarity of thought. The answers given by Jesus to these two questions remain for all time the models, which mortal man can only hope to emulate.

"Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?" (the affable tone of honest enquiry can be heard). "But Jesus perceived their wickedness and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? . . . Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. When they heard these words, they marveled, and left him and went their way".

On the second occasion, "a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" In his answer Jesus again swept aside the great mass of Levitical Law and restated the two essentials: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart . . . and thy neighbour as thyself".

Then came the baited trap: "And who is my neighbour?"

What mortal man would have given the answer that Jesus gave? No doubt some mortal men, knowing like Jesus that their lives were at stake, would have said what they believed, for martyrs are by no means rare. But Jesus did much more than that; he disarmed his questioner like an expert swordsman who effortlessly sends his opponent's rapier spinning into the air. He was being enticed to declare himself openly; to say that "the heathen" were also "neighbours", and thus to convict himself of transgressing The Law. In fact he replied in this sense, but in such a way that the interrogator was undone; seldom was a lawyer so confounded.

The Levitical-Pharisaic teaching was that only Judeans were "neighbours", and of all the outcast heathen they especially abominated the Samaritans. The mere touch of a Samaritan was defilement and a major "transgression" (this continues true to the present day). The purpose of the question put to him was to lure Jesus into some statement that would qualify him for the major ban; by choosing the Samaritans, of all peoples, for the purpose of his reply, he displayed an audacity, or genius, that was more than human: He said that a certain man fell among thieves and was left for dead. Then came "a priest" and "likewise a Levite" (the usual stinging rebuke to those who sought the chance to put him to death), who "passed by on the other side". Last came "a certain Samaritan", who bound the man's injuries, took him to an inn, and paid for his care: "which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?"

The lawyer, cornered, could not bring himself to pronounce the defiling name "Samaritan"; he said, "He that showed mercy on him" and thereby joined himself (as he probably realized too late) with the condemnation of those for whom he spoke, such as "the priest" and "the Levite". "Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise". In these few words, and without any direct allusion, he made his interrogator destroy, out of his own mouth, the entire racial heresy on which the Law had been raised.

One moderate Judaist critic, Mr. Montefiore, has made the complaint that Jesus made one exception to his rule of "love thine enemies"; he never said a good word for the Pharisees.

Scholars may debate the point. Jesus knew that they would kill him or any man who exposed them. It is true that he especially arraigned the Pharisees, together with the scribes, and plainly saw in them the sect responsible for the perversion of the Law, so that the entire literature of denunciation contains nothing to equal this: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in . . . ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves ….. ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith. . . ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess . . . ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. . . ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers. . ."

These last words of Jesus seem to be quite harsh, and according to Mack, were part of the layer of "sayings" that were added later after significant negative interactions with the Pharisees by the people who followed the social program of the cynic-like sage around whom the Jesus legend accreted. What is clear, however, is that this passage does reflect something real about the innovative ideas of those early "Jesus people" and their awareness of pathological deviants.

Now, to get back to my theme, the interesting thing about all of this is that when I read John Kaminski's disparaging dig at me, I just wondered "huh? What is up with that? I've never been anything but nice to the guy; supported him emotionally and financially when everyone else was turning against him, and he does that?" So, certainly I was hurt and puzzled.

It was almost immediately afterward that I began reading the Rosenbaum book and noted that odd connection between Fritz Gerlich and Therese Neumann as well as Rosenbaum's defamatory dismissal of Neumann as a fraud - a typically Jewish stance. Let me explain what I mean. Some years back when I was researching channeling, I noticed a very odd thing: it seems that it is Judaism that has "rationalized" our world and destroyed the very roots of Western/Celtic civilization, i.e. the source of Esoteric Christianity - our very spiritual natures.

When one tracks back through all of the ancient “matters” and studies the different groups, trying to follow them as they moved from place to place, studying the genetic morphology in order to keep track of who is who, and comparing linguistics and myth and archaeology, one comes to the startling realization that there were significant polarities throughout space and time. I have tentatively identified these polarities as the Circle People and the Triangle - or Pyramid - People. In a general sense, one can see the broad brush of the triangle people in the Southern hemisphere, in the pyramids and related cultures and artifacts. For the most part, their art is primitive and stylistically rigid. In the northern hemisphere, one sees the circle makers, the spirals, the rough megaliths, the art of Lascaux and Chauvet and the many other caves. One can note a clear difference between the perceptions and the response to the environment between the two trends and groups. Of course, there are areas where there was obvious mixture of both cultures and styles, and ideological constructions, but overall, there is a very distinct difference.

There are many books on “alternative science” being published in the present time about the purported ancient civilizations. One assumption that they all seem to hold in common is that everything was all hunky dory, sweetness and light among all the people, and the only thing that happened was that a nasty cataclysm came along and brought it all to an end. They keep forgetting the issue of the Vedas and Plato’s Timaeus where an ancient war was described, and it was at that point in time, or immediately after, that the cosmic catastrophe occurred. It would then be only reasonable to suspect that the same differences between the warring parties would be carried over into the post cataclysmic world. And it seems to be a reasonable assumption that the “southern influence,” including Egypt, was that of the “Atlanteans” of Plato, and that the “northern influence,” including the builders of Stonehenge, were the “Athenians” of Plato, the “Sons of Boreas,” or the North Wind, keeping in mind that these “Athenians” were obviously not from Athens as we know it today, though we are beginning to suspect that we know who they were.

We should also like to note that the so-called “civilizing influence” of the South, of the creators of agricultural civilizations, the instigation of writing and the wheel and so forth, is always connected in some way to “scaly” critters like Fish Gods or Serpents. It isn’t until fairly late that the Serpent makes his appearance among the archaeological finds of Europe and central Asia. Before the serpent appeared there, there were only goddesses, birds, and wavy lines representing water and cosmic energy. I think that it is dangerous to confuse the issues. Again and again we see currents of two completely different processes, two factions, two ways of perceiving and interacting with the cosmos: one that wishes to conceal, and one that wishes to reveal, one that wishes to dominate, one that wishes to share.

We notice that many megalithic sites are located a certain points that correspond with a certain geometry. But, if we look even closer, if we discard the current so-called “Sacred Geometry” and just look at the sites themselves and let them speak - all of them - instead of leaving this one or that one out because it doesn’t quite fit, or only is “very close” to fitting, we may discover another relationship that is suggested by the sites, rather than working to fit the sites into an assumption.

So many bizarre ideas are being propagated at the present time, including the preposterous one about the megaliths being set up to absorb the energy of human sacrifices and that the stones “drink blood,” that it is quite discouraging to realize how easily people are misled by nonsense. If such writers cannot figure out that the megaliths were demonized by the church because they were revered by the nature religions, which we theorize are carriers of ancient scientific knowledge, and the nature religions themselves were also demonized, then there isn’t much chance that they will figure anything else out either. Such people also tend to be convinced that the Holy Grail is the cup from the Last Supper, too, and I won’t even comment on that.

Regarding the Celts: We are taught almost nothing about them in school, though they seem to be considered as the ancestors of most Europeans, thus also Americans. Why is it that the religion and culture of the Mesopotamian region dominates our lives and our culture when it is, in effect, “foreign”?

Celtic vernacular literature, including myths, stories and poems, in its written form, dates mainly from the Middle Ages. It is based on oral transmission that goes far beyond the Christian Era. It is very difficult to get a clear picture of the pre-Christian Celts from the transmitted texts, not only because of the typical mixture of myth and reality, and the lapse of time, but also because the Roman empire sought to stamp it out starting with Caesar and continuing with the Roman church.

However, studying what is available closely, one gets the impression of a dynamic, somewhat undisciplined people. The Celts were proud, imaginative, artistic, lovers of freedom and adventure, eloquence, poetry, and arts. You can always discern the Celtic influence by the great artistic talents of these peoples.

The Celts were very suspicious of any kind of centralized “authority,” and this is, in the end, what brought about their downfall. They could not stand against the hierarchical war machine of the Roman empire. In a sense, you could almost say that this is how Hitler nearly conquered Europe, most especially France. Gauls take the principles of liberty and equality very seriously - right down to the common man on the street who in no way considers himself inferior to the Prime Minister.

One of the principal historians of the Roman era, Julius Caesar, tells us that the Celts were ruled by the Druids. The druids “held all knowledge.” The Druids were charged with all intellectual activities, and were not restricted to religion, per se, which suggests to us that “religion” and “knowledge” in a more or less scientific approach, were considered essential to one another - symbiotic.

It is later writers who began to vilify the Celts by accusing them of the usual things that people get accused of when someone wants to demonize them: human sacrifice, homosexuality, and so on. Most of that nonsense goes back to Posidonius, who has been quoted as an “authority” by every other “authority” on the Celts since. Unfortunately, when one checks Posidonius, one finds that he really didn’t have a clue and was probably making stuff up to fulfill an agenda.

The lack of written texts by the Celts has been the greatest problem for historians and students of the Celts. A lot of ideas are “supposed” or ancient sources with agendas have been relied on, and some of them even propose that there was a “taboo” by the Celts on putting things into writing.

Well, I suppose that, if our civilization came to an end and all our records on magnetic media were destroyed, people might say that we didn’t put anything in writing either.

There has been a lot of nonsense written about why the Celts didn’t write things down, and the most nonsensical, considering what we do know about their culture, is that this was how the Druids “kept their power” or that they believed something silly like: “if the sacred myths were revealed, they would become profaned and thus lose their mystic virtues.”

What Caesar said was that the reason for the ban on writing was that the Druids were concerned that their pupils should not neglect the training of their memories, i.e. the Frontal Cortex, by relying on written texts. I discussed the production of ligands and their potential for unlocking DNA in my book Secret History of the World. It seems to be very interesting that the very things that we have learned from the Cassiopaeans, from alchemical texts, from our own experiences, and from research - that “thinking with a hammer” is the key to transformation - was noted as an integral part of the Druidic initiation.

It is worth noting that, in the nineteenth century, it was observed that the illiterate Yugoslav bards, who were able to recite interminable poems, actually lost their ability to memorize once they had learned to rely on reading and writing. Although the Druids prohibited certain things from being written down, it’s clear that they did write. Celtic writings in Ogamic script have been found on many ancient stones. Caesar tells us that the Celts were using the Greek alphabet when the Romans arrived in Gaul in the first century BC.

However, the knowledge of the initiates was transmitted entirely orally, and with the information about ligands and receptors, we are beginning to understand why.

The destruction of Celtic culture was so complete that we know very little about their religion. We do know that they celebrated their “rites” in forests and by lakes without erecting any covered temples or statues of divinities. Tacitus tells us:

They do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls, or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places are woods and groves and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presence which is seen only by the eyes of reverence.

Plato had doubts about the Greek origins of Homer’s work because not only do the physical descriptions in his poems not correspond to the Greek world, but also the Homeric philosophy is very different from the mainstream Greek philosophy we know about today. The latter is based on the dualism of two opposing elements, thesis/antithesis, good/evil, life/death, body/soul, etc. omitting the idea of the Third Force. Since Plato’s times, many have sought to derive “synthesis” from these opposing elements, with little success. The “third force” of Gurdjieff has been brought up many times with little satisfaction in the attempts to understand it, and perhaps it is in what we can derive from the Celtic teachings will help us here.

According to Homer, the philosophy of the ancient world was that there was a third element that linked the opposing elements. Between the body and the soul, there is the spirit. Between life and death there is the transformation that is possible to the individual, between father and mother there is the child who takes the characteristics of both father and mother, and between good and evil there is the specific situation that determines which is which and what ought to be done.

In other words, there are three simultaneous determinants in any situation that make it impossible to say that any list of things is “good” or “evil” intrinsically, and that the true determinant is the situation. In any event, the symbol of this philosophy is the triskele, representing three waves joined together. The simultaneous existence of the third element does not mean that the notion of “good” and “evil” did not exist or was not reflected in the Celtic law. What was clear was that it was understood that nothing could be “cut and dried” in terms of law, that each situation was unique and the circumstances had to be carefully weighed. Aristotle considered Gaul to be the “teacher” of Greece and the Druids to be the “inventors of philosophy.” The Greeks also considered the Druids to be the world’s greatest scholars, and whose mathematical knowledge was the source of Pythagoras‘ information.

It seems that all "primitive" or preliterate cultures had some form of codified communication between "spirits" and the living. Again, let me reiterate that I consider this nomenclature to be simply convention. This phenomenon seems to be universal in the ancient world, and only came under condemnation with the inception of monotheism around 1000 BC. When Yahweh spoke through his channels, they were called prophets and the activity was "divine inspiration". When anybody else did it, it was necromancy or demonic possession, or even just out and out deception. This was because, obviously, since Jehovah/Yahweh was the only god, those other "gods" did not exist, therefore, anyone who claimed to be communicating with them was lying. Of course that begs the question as to why people were put to death for lying about communicating with gods that were claimed not to exist? And, if they did actually exist, and were actually communicating, as Yahweh was also, then what status does that suggest about Yahweh, since he was the one who claimed to be the only god and that this was true simply because Yahweh said so via channeling? Most curious.

In the sixth century BC the Thracian Dionysiac cults were known to be using shamans as trance channels to communicate with the spirits, or what were then known as theoi or gods that were said to be discarnate immortal beings with superhuman powers. Some scholars suggest that rationalist philosophy was born out of the Dionysiac, Orphic, and Eleusinian mystery cults devoted to the channeling of these gods; certainly much ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Plato, was saturated with these mysteries. In Plato's Theagetes Socrates confesses, "By the favour of the Gods, I have since my childhood been attended by a semi-divine being whose voice from time to time dissuades me from some undertaking, but never directs me what I am to do."

The most interesting item of all is the fact that Pythagoras used something like a Ouija board as early as 540 BC: a "mystic table" on wheels moved around and pointed toward signs that were then interpreted by the philosopher himself, or his pupil Philolaus. Even down to the present day, the mysteries of the Pythagoreans are subjects of intense interest to scientists and mystics alike. And here there seems to be evidence that the advanced knowledge of Pythagoras may have been obtained via a Ouija board!

This brings us back to the question, of course, as to how "channeled" information, which is most certainly what formed the basis of what was later twisted and contorted in Judaism, could have been the basis of the Rationalist philosophy that there was nothing to channel? Could it be merely a progression of the idea of Yahweh/Jehovah that there was only one god, and he was it? Just another step in stripping away any spiritual support from the lives of human beings? From "many gods", i.e. our "higher selves," we were reduced to one, and only one God, and this god was the God of the Jews, or the Judaens as they were known then. Yes, there are variations on this theme, and both Christianity and Islam claim to represent the same god, the one the priests of the Judaens invented as the "only god". More than that, there was only one way to "approach" God, and that was through the duly authorized priest or ritual or both. By the time the Romans had conquered Greece, the rationalist movement was turning against spirit-channeling.

Cicero, the Roman rationalist whom the early Church Fathers highly revered, railed against spirit-channeling or necromancy on the grounds that it involved ghastly pagan rituals. Perhaps, by that time, it did. Just look at the whole New Age/Spiritualist movment today. What a morass.

What seems to have happened is that, eventually, rationalism bit the hand that fed it and began to devour its father, monotheism, by further extending the argument to the idea that there is no god, there are no spirits, nothing survives the death of the physical body, so there is really nobody for us to talk to on the "other side," so why bother? Science took the view that the whole thing was a con game, and that's pretty much the current mainstream scientific opinion of the phenomenon today. And science is, as it happens, in many ways dominated by Jews. Moreover, they are proud of the fact of their great intellectual achievements, so stating it is no attack on them.

We come back now to consider the passage quoted from Rosenbaum about Gerlich and Therese Neumann, that part of Rosenbaum's contempt for her was that even her own church did not accept her as a true stigmatic. That may, of course, have had something to do with her politics and perhaps even her philosophy as it was delivered in her channeling. What is certainly true is that Therese Neumann, a channeler, was the inspiration behind one of the bravest journalists in Germany during the times in which Hitler rose to power. Even after Gerlich's murder in Dachau, the circle around Therese Neumann continued their participation in the morally significant resistance to Hitler. It was the mystical source of Gerlich's strength that infused his incisive, surgical dissection of Hitler's mentality. And it is this legacy he has left behind for all of us.

Throughout history, extending back and back before any written records, people obtained much strength from mystical sources. As we have seen in this article, such sources came under attack with the rise of the monotheistic religions. The connection between an emotional knowledge of the world and an intellectual knowledge of the world was snapped. We live under the horrific conditions that are the result of this break. A large part of mankind is now slave to his intellect. The apprehending of the world via the emotions, the intuition, inspiration, which I suggest are the basis for mystical experiences and genuine channeling -- that is, a link with the higher centers discussed by Gurdjieff and Mouravieff and part of the Tradition taught by the historical personage who later became transformed into the Jesus of the New Testament -- go outside of the hierarchical structures the rational mind has built to imprison us, be it materialistic science on the one hand or the need to communicate with the divine via priests and other representatives on the other hand. In the people of the circle, everyone had his or her own link to the center point, at least potentially. In the people of the triangle or pyramid, the base must pass through all the intermediate layers to reach the peak. Monotheism is the ideal representation of this structure. The direct connection with the divine was killed; it had to be killed.

This death of our own divinity is the true legacy bequeathed to us by the priests who built the walls around the people of Judea.

I began by citing John Kaminski's attack on me and his pejorative reference to channeling. It is ironic, but ultimately sad, that a man who has fallen into such rabid anti-Semitism should himself be held captive and enchained by a legacy that has its origins with those he sees as his bitterist enemies.


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Editorial: The Mathematics of Flying (or not)

Henry See
Signs of the Times
20 October 2006

You have all heard of the notorious "No-Fly" list compiled by the American government. It is the list of suspected terrorists who are not permitted onto flights coming to, leaving, or flying within the United States. According to CBS News, the list includes 44,000 people not allowed to fly, along with another 75,000 who should be taken aside for "additional security screening", or, in layman's terms, "advanced humiliation techniques".

That's a heck of a lot of "suspected terrorists" and their "cronies"; but before you start to feel safe, snug, and secure knowing that the Department of Homeland Security is doing everything it can to protect you and your loved ones from crazed "Islamofascists", it appears that there is a slight problem with the list. It doesn't contain the names of any real "suspected terrorists" because those names are confidential. The CBS News report tells us:
What Kip Hawley wouldn't tell 60 Minutes is that some of the some of most dangerous terrorists never even end up on the No Fly List, because the intelligence agencies that supply the names don't want them circulated to airport employees in foreign countries for fear that they could end up in the hands of the terrorists.

Cathy Berrick, the Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues for the General Accounting Office told Kroft that the lists that the airlines get have been sanitized of the most sensitive information.

"They're not given all of the names for security reasons because the government doesn't want to have that information outside of the government," Berrick says.

"But if the point of the system is to keep dangerous people from getting on airplanes, why would you leave some of the potentially most dangerous people off the list?" Kroft asks.

"Yeah, it's a concern. And I think if you talk with the Department of Homeland Security they would agree with that," Berrick says.
Uh, did you get that? Did you really understand what they are telling us openly and without any shame?

Let's run through this again. The no-fly list was created to keep potential Mohammed Atta's off of planes that could be used to create another 9/11, if one accepts the official US government conspiracy theory. However, the names of those suspected terrorists are too sensitive to be put on the lists because publishing them could tip off the terrorists that they are being watched, so they have been removed. Now, a normal person, using their normal intelligence and logical capacities would reason something like this:

If you have a list of suspected terrorists who are not allowed to fly, and then you remove the suspected terrorists from the list because their names are confidential, you would be left with no names. In mathematical terms, the formula for adding the names to the list would look like this:

0 + X = X

where 0 is the number of names before adding the list of suspected terrorists, and X is the number of suspected terrorists. So once the names of suspected terrorists have been added, you have X suspected terrorists on the list.

It isn't high level math.

Therefore we have established that there are X names of suspected terrorists on the list of suspected terrorists who are not allowed to fly. So the spooks in Washington and at the NSA look at the list and one says, "Yup, it's a good list." And the colleague says, "Damn right. I've never seen a better one! They're all there."

"OK. Mark it Way Above Top Secret." And the other guy pulls out his little rubber stamp and goes stamp, stamp, stamp on each of the pages.

"What do we do now?"

"Well, we have to release it to the airlines."

"What level security clearance do they have?"

Then they both get panic stricken looks on their faces when they realize that the employees of the airlines don't have the necessary security clearance.

"It's a damn fine list, but we can't release it to the public."

"Oh my god! You're right! It's classified information!"

So then they embark on the tedious process of undoing all the good work they have just finished. And there's a mathematical formula for that, too.

The next step, removing the names of suspected terrorists from the list of suspected terrorists because they are too sensitive to release, gives the following equation:

X - X = 0

Notice that last number in the equation. According to a top level mathematician I know, whose word on such finer things mathematical I trust 100%, it is a zero which is the empty set. It doesn't contain any elements. That means the list should have no names on it.

Yet there still remain on the American No Fly list 44,000 names of people who are not allowed to fly and another 75,000 who will be subjected to humiliating searches and delays.

So who is it that they are targeting and why, if it isn't the "terrorists"?

The American people, of course.

In fact, the no-fly list was never about protecting the US public. It was always about frightening people, because it is through fear that the population can be controlled and convinced to give up the rights and liberties their ancestors fought and died for.

We saw a text book case of that process in July when the 'bombing scare' in Britain tried to convince us that those damn terrorists could concoct a liquid bomb in the toilet of an airplane from carry-on materials. The fallout repressive measures forced people to remove their shoes, forbid the carrying on of any liquids, including bottled water, the placing of certain items in clear plastic bags, not to mention long lines in the airports.

Not in the name of protection and security, but in the name of the fear factor, of controlling the population, of taking away their rights and liberties, exactly those rights and liberties the Bush gang and the Blair poodle squad claim they are defending through their revocation.

George Orwell would be sick. We're sick.

Notice how the fine public servants who are implementing this policy talk about it openly. Notice how they don't see any problem or inherent contradiction in compiling a list of suspected terrorists that doesn't contain any suspected terrorists. They are aware that it is used for other purposes, to harass people who are vocal in their disdain and criticism of the fascism that is descending upon America, to create the impression among the sheeple that there is a real threat, to justify the loss of rights. They are aware that it is a front, a smokescreen, a ploy to get more power, but as they are part of the ploy, they can tell their stories with a straight face.

Time is running out, folks. It may already be too late. When the powers that be can tell whoppers like this one without even a delayed reaction from the media or the representatives who claim to be representing your interests and freedoms, the clock is running out of time. Sure, it was CBS who disclosed the story. But then what? What happens next?

If you leave it up to CBS or anyone else, you've handed over your responsibility. What does your conscience tell you to do? If you can't hear that voice, maybe you better start trying to find it.
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Editorial: The "Wretched of the Earth" Raise Their Voices of Dignity in the UN

Carol Delgado
Venezuelanalysis.com
Wednesday, Oct 18, 2006

Most papers have portrayed the battle taking place at the UN, for the Security Council seat, as one in which Guatemala has beat Venezuela in most voting rounds. This, however, is an oversimplified view of what has been happening. Rather, the success of Venezuela's candidacy cannot be measured in terms of rounds won or lost because the dignity and voice of the voiceless cannot be negotiated, silenced, or beaten. The dignity of the countries backing Venezuela cannot be understood at the UN because it is not for sale. These nations are determined to fight for a better future for their people. Also, this battle is not just about war, but about inhuman sanctions that annihilate civilian populations more cruelly and slowly than an atomic bomb. It is also about the historical hunger for justice that children, men, and women have, who have been subdued by war and by IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs.

The cardinal mission of the United Nations is peace, but we have a body that is an inarticulate monster of a thousand heads that confuses and acts according to an outdated, first world logic. This is how we have a corrupted UN Security Council with an amoral diplomacy that ignores the Israeli massacre in Lebanon in order to placate the North American empire.

The world of diplomacy is a world of conformism, of a virtual reality of the elites, a world of minimalist goals that resolve nothing. Diplomacy that supports the U.S. is irresponsible and shortsighted. Abstention is the option of the cautious who want to save face in both worlds, without understanding that either we fight against an amoral order or there will be no peace for anyone.

The victory of the countries that support Venezuela is a fact - it is not just about a seat on the Security Council. The peoples that support Venezuela have decided to unite their destinies as sovereign nations, their determination to overcome being the "wretched of the earth," as Frantz Fanon said, in order to give battles for justice and a planetary peace that would make the United Nations look small in comparison. My respect goes to the brave diplomats that represent our dignity and the human rights of the "sub-humans" in the United Nations.

Venezuela has been emphatic in affirming that it is not competing with its sister republic of Guatemala for the Security Council seat, but is competing with the Empire, the United States. And this has been evident by the constant lobbying and movement between delegations all day by the U.S. Ambassador-a shameful lobbying-while the Guatemalan Ambassador remained in his seat, watching over the voting. Later the Guatemalan Ambassador went on to say that Venezuela is sequestering all ambassadors in the UN building by not refusing to withdraw its candidacy.

In reality, what has been sequestered is peace itself, the conscience of the diplomats, of heads of state, preventing that the voice of the peoples could be heard in the Security Council. This is how some seek to continue to leverage preventive wars, massacres, and the destruction of entire peoples. The business of war is coldly and "diabolically" calculated so that the company of the U.S. Vice-President obtains contracts for reconstructing that which has been destroyed and so that the empire thus gains control over zones with immense oil reserves, justifies its disproportionately high military expenditures, and guarantees immense profits for the private businesses of the elite that currently governs it.

We might lose this battle, but the will of half of the world's nations has been empowered and will continue to raise their voices and fight for peace.

Carol Delgado is a long-time Venezuelan activist.

Original
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Paranormal Science


Theories of telepathy and afterlife cause uproar at top science forum

By Mark Henderson, Science Editor
London Times
6 September 2006

SCIENTISTS claiming to have evidence of life after death and the powers of telepathy triggered a furious row at Britain's premier science festival yesterday. Organisers of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) were accused of lending credibility to maverick theories on the paranormal by allowing the highly controversial research to be aired unchallenged.

Leading members of the science establishment criticised the BA's decision to showcase papers purporting to demonstrate telepathy and the survival of human consciousness after someone dies. They said that such ideas, which are widely rejected by experts, had no place in the festival without challenge from sceptics.
The disputed session featured research from Rupert Sheldrake, an independent biologist who is funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, that claims to have found evidence that some people know telepathically who is calling them before they answer the telephone.

Other presentations came from Peter Fenwick, a doctor who thinks deathbed visions suggest that consciousness survives when people die, and from Deborah Delanoy of the University of Hertfordshire, whose work suggests that people can affect the bodies of others by thinking about them.

Critics including Lord Winston and Sir Walter Bodmer, both former presidents of the BA, expressed particular alarm that the three speakers were allowed to hold a promotional press conference. Some said telepathy has already been found wanting in experiments, and had no place at a scientific meeting.

"Work in this field is a complete waste of time," said Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. "Although it is politically incorrect to dismiss ideas out of hand, in this case there is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan's fantasy. "

Other scientists said that while discussion of the subject was acceptable, the panel's lack of balance was like inviting creationists to address the prestigious meeting without an opposing view from evolutionary biologists. Several members of the BA said that they would raise the matter with its ruling council.

Sir Walter, a geneticist and cancer researcher, said: "I'm amazed that the BA has allowed it to happen in this way. You have got to be careful not to suppress ideas, even if they are beyond the pale, but it's quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view. It's extremely important in cases like this, especially for the BA which represents science and which people expect to believe, to provide a proper balancing counter-argument."

Lord Winston, the fertility specialist, said: "It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields. It's something the BA should consider, whether a session like this should go unchallenged by regular scientists."

Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, who is a sceptical researcher of the paranormal, said: "The issue is about controversy and balance in science. This is not a balanced panel. Whether paranormal phenomena are a reality is an intellectual discussion. But it is the principle that is important. If the issue was race and intelligence, and you had three people saying one race are less intelligent than another, that would be outrageous."

Chris French, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, a sceptic of the paranormal, joined a panel discussion, but did not present a paper or attend the press briefing.



The event was organised by the Scientific and Medical Network, an organisation with about 3,000 members dedicated to "exploring the interface of science, medicine and spirituality". The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, said it "lies far from the scientific mainstream and the list of speakers reflect this".

Helen Haste, chairwoman of the BA's programme organising committee, said that all three speakers have proper academic credentials and that though their work is controversial, it is conducted in a rigorous, scholarly fashion. Professor French's presence at the panel discussion would allow for sceptical dissent to be heard, though it was unfortunate he was not at the press event, she said. "We feel at the BA that we should be open to discussions or debates that are seen as valid by people inside the scientific community, as long as they are addressed in acceptable ways. These seem to be phenomena that are commonly experienced but have not been subjected particularly effectively to scientific investigation. It is a legitimate area of research. I do think it's appropriate at a festival like this to have people who are serious about their approach and experimental methods."

The BA, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, is a charity that seeks to advance public understanding, accessibility and accountability of the sciences and engineering. Its annual meeting, which is being held this year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has often caused controversy, most notably in 1860 when Thomas Huxley championed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution against Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford.

When asked whether he thought that he was descended from apes on his mother's or father's side, Huxley responded: "I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop."

"We need the opposing view"

Lord Winston, fertility specialist and former president of the BA:

"I know of no serious, properly done studies which make me feel that this is anything other than nonsense. It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields."

Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire:

"Whether paranormal phenomena are a reality is mainly an intellectual discussion. But it is the principle that is important. If the issue was race and intelligence, and you had three people saying one race is less intelligent than another, that would be be outrageous. If there is not a consensus within science then there should be balance."

Sir Walter Bodmer, geneticist and President of Hertford College, Oxford:

"I'm amazed that the BA has allowed it to happen in this way. You have got to be careful not to suppress ideas, even if they are beyond the pale, but it's quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view. It's extremely important in cases like this, especially for the BA, which represents science and which people expect to believe, to provide a proper counter-argument."

Professor Peter Atkins, Fellow and Tutor in Physical Chemisty, Oxford University:

"Although it is politically incorrect to dismiss ideas out of hand, in this case there is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan's fantasy. If telepathy were a real phenomenon, evolution and natural selection would have developed it into a serious ability. That has not occurred in this case, neither speaker has a reputation for reliability, and it is extraordinary that the BA should consider them worth a platform."

A Royal Society spokesman:

"The Scientific and Medical Network, which is organising this session, lies far from the scientific mainstream and the list of speakers reflects this. I hope that the audience attending the session will expose the speakers' presentations to similarly robust scrutiny."



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Occult claims clamor for serious study

By Deborah Blum
The Mercury News
29 September 06

A hundred years ago, one of the most ambitious of research projects was launched, a study that linked scholars and mediums on three continents. Its purpose was to discover whether living humans could talk to dead ones.
Newspapers described the work as "remarkable experiments testing the reality of life after death.'' The scholars involved included William James, the famed American psychologist and philosopher, and Oliver Lodge, the British physicist and radio pioneer. They saw evidence for the supernatural -- in this world and perhaps the next.

In one instance they made a request to an American medium while she was in a trance. The request was in Latin, a language the medium did not speak. The instructions included a proposal that she "send'' a symbol to a British medium. During her next trance session, the American began asking about whether an "arrow'' had been received. Later, comparing notes, the researchers discovered that during the American's first trance, the English psychic had suddenly begun scribbling arrows. It was only after a series of similar results that the researchers published their findings.

For many, the dismissal of such Victorian research represents a triumph of modern science over superstition. But -- and I admit that this is an unusual position for a mainstream science writer -- I believe that it may instead represent a missed opportunity, a lost chance to better understand ourselves and our world.

Curiosity about the supernatural has not diminished over the last century. The past few years have seen a surge in occult-themed TV, including such popular dramas as "Medium,'' parodies such as "Psych'' and reality-themed shows featuring professional mediums or paranormal investigators. On the radio, "Coast to Coast AM With George Noory'' focuses on supernatural issues and boasts 2.5 million listeners. Paranormal organizations, schools for mediums and practicing psychics flourish.

What has diminished is the interest of academic researchers on a par with James and his colleagues -- and, correspondingly, the quality of the science. Yes, there are paranormal investigators using modern technology to hunt for the purported heat signature (in the infrared) of ghosts or the "energy'' of a spectral communication (electronic voice phenomena). There are even a few accomplished university scientists exploring the supernatural, although often on the side and covertly. But there's nothing as sophisticated, at least in design, as the Victorians' work.

In addition to the ambitious "cross-correspondence'' study cited earlier, the Victorian scholars ran an international survey of reported ghost sightings, particularly those tied to the death of a relative or friend. Tens of thousands of people in multiple countries were interviewed; hundreds of volunteers sifted through the reports, rejecting those that lacked independent witnesses or documentation. They concluded that "death visitants'' occurred more than 400 times above chance.

By comparison, a modern telepathy study, presented this month at an annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, involved 63 people asked to say in advance which of four friends or relatives was calling on the telephone. The answers were 45 percent correct, which, the researchers claimed, was above the 25 percent expected through chance.

I confess that this was a rather silly and unconvincing experiment -- too small and too poorly controlled to prove anything. But I've seen plenty of orthodox research studies that made claims based on even sketchier experiments. So it doesn't convince me, as it did a host of angry British scientists, that telepathy is merely "a charlatan's fancy.'' It convinces me that we need smarter science on all levels.

"Either I or the scientist is a fool with our opposing views of probability,'' James wrote. The risk of appearing foolish, he believed, was the least of the dangers. There also was the risk of failing to investigate the world in all its dimensions, or making it appear smaller and less interesting than it really is. He worried about a time when people would become "indifferent to science because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences.'' He worried that a close-minded community of science could become a kind of cult itself, devoted to its own beliefs and no more.

And, as should be obvious here, I have come to agree with him.

DEBORAH BLUM is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death.'' She wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.




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Controversies: Rupert at the BA Festival of Science UEA Norwich Sept 2-9th 2006

Rupert Sheldrake Website
September 2006

On September 5, 2006, Rupert gave a presentation on telephone telepathy at the annual Science Festival the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest science event in Europe. This was widely reported in the media, and in Britain The Times and other newspapers reported a controversy in which several well-known sceptics objected to the BA "lending credibility to maverick theories on the paranormal". For example, Prof Peter Atkins, a chemist at Oxford University, was quoted as saying, "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan's fantasy."
However, The Times editorial writers took a different view, and an amusing third leader the same day was headed "It goes without saying that telepathy works." The Times editorial
The same afternoon, BBC Radio 5 Live brought Rupert together with Prof Atkins, live on air. You can read the transcript of the Atkins-Sheldrake discussion in which Prof Atkins admitted that he had not studied any of the evidence, and felt no need to do so.

The following day, The Times published an article by Rupert on their op-ed pages Gosh, I was just thinking about you
and there were several letters on the subject, published under the heading Science resists the unknown.
At the BA Science Festival, Rupert took part in a discussion on research on unexplained phenomena mediated by Quentin Cooper, with Dr Peter Fenwick, Prof Deborah Delanoy, and Prof Chris French, editor of The Skeptic. This was broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 science programme, The Material World, on September 7, and can be heard online at The Material World



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SCIENTIFIC STUDIES IN LIFE AFTER DEATH: A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife

Victor J. Zammit

A LAWYER'S WAY: my professional training as a lawyer taught me that in ALL circumstances, without exception, NEVER to believe anyone, anywhere, anytime and anyplace unless I am presented with irrefutable, hard core evidence that what is being stated and expressed can be independently substantiated. There is NO other way to deal with the truth, the whole truth. This is the kind of admissible evidence I have presented in my book (click top right) AND when dealing with the sensational materializations experiments I am investigating. Just because a debunker does not accept the evidence for materializations does not mean that materializations are not taking place...

Visit the Website to download and read the book and additional information.




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Gosh, I was just thinking about you - If you think telepathy is tosh, many scientists agree with you. But they ignore the evidence

Rupert Sheldrake
London Times
7 September 06

HAVE YOU EVER thought about someone for no apparent reason, and then that person rang on the telephone? Have you felt you were being watched, and turned round to find someone staring at you?

Recent surveys show that a majority of the population in Britain have had these experiences. If they are more than coincidences or illusions, they suggest that minds are more extensive than brains.
There is a growing body of evidence that telepathy and the sense of being stared at are real, with an active discussion of these topics in scientific journals - for example, last year a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies was devoted to the ability to detect stares, for which the scientific name is scopaesthesia, from the Greek words for viewing and feeling. This ability may have a long evolutionary history. Animals that were able to detect the looks of hidden predators may well have survived better than animals without this ability.

Telepathy may also have deep biological roots, acting as a means of communication at a distance between members of animal groups. It is still expressed in domesticated animals, many of which seem to be able to detect the feelings and intentions of their owners beyond the range of the usual senses. For example, many dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, and go to wait at a door. In some cases they do this when the person is still miles away, long before the animal could have heard familiar footsteps or car sounds. In a series of videotaped tests, I found that dogs still went and waited at the door when the owners returned at times randomly selected by the experimenter, when no one at home knew when they were coming, and when they travelled in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis.

Many mothers still seem to feel when their children need them, even if they are miles away. Children whose absent mothers responded to their distress telepathically and returned to them would be more likely to survive than children with unresponsive mothers; so telepathic traits may have been favoured by natural selection.

The commonest kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world takes place in connection with telephone calls. About 80 per cent of the population claim to have had experiences in which they think of someone for no apparent reason, then that person calls; or they know who is calling when the phone rings, before picking it up. Many people have had similar experiences with e-mails.

Is this just coincidence? An illusion of telepathy could be created if people remembered when someone called or e-mailed soon after they thought about that person, but forgot all the times that they thought about someone who did not contact them. An illusion of telepathy could also arise if someone had an unconscious expectation that someone they knew would call or e-mail, based on an implicit knowledge of that person's behaviour. Until recently, there were no scientific investigations of telephone telepathy to test these possibilities.

Over the past few years, with the help of my research associate, Pam Smart, I have investigated telephone telepathy experimentally in hundreds of controlled trials. Volunteers were asked to give us the names and telephone numbers of four people they knew well. During the test session, the subject was videotaped continuously sitting by a landline telephone. We selected one of the callers at random by the throw of a die. We then asked that person to call the subject. When the telephone rang, the participant guessed who was calling before lifting the receiver. The guess was either right or wrong.

By chance, participants would have been right about one time in four. In fact, 45 per cent of the guesses were correct. This research has been replicated at the University of Amsterdam, again with positive results.

Tests in which some of the callers were near the Antipodes, in Australia and New Zealand, showed that the effect did not seem to fall off with distance. Emotional closeness, rather than physical proximity, seemed to be the most important factor.

However, some scientists are so strongly committed to a belief that the mind is confined to the head that they dismiss all such evidence as illusory. For example in yesterday's Times, Professor Peter Atkins, a chemist, described telepathy as a "charlatan's fantasy". But no one understands very much about the nature of our minds. The very existence of consciousness is unexplained. The conventional idea that mental activity is nothing but brain activity is only an assumption, not a proven fact.

Instead, I suggest that our minds may extend far beyond our brains, stretching out through fields that link us to our environment and to each other. Fields are more extensive than material objects: magnetic fields extend around magnets, and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones. Likewise, mental fields are rooted in brains but extend beyond them. The directions depend on our attention and intention.

Mental fields could help to explain telepathy, the sense of being stared at and other widespread but unexplained abilities. Of course this hypothesis is controversial. But science progresses not through dogma and polemic, but by exploring new possibilities and by paying attention to the evidence.

The author is director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. www.sheldrake.org



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Science resists the unknown - Letters to the London Times

London Times
7 September 06

Sir,

I was delighted to see that telepathy is being taken seriously, but sad to see the usual response of scientists ("Theories of telepathy and afterlife cause uproar at top science forum", Sept 6). Certainly, telepathy and near-death experience are beyond explanation by conventional ideas. But to respond by dismissing the experience of large numbers of people is very unscientific.
The sceptics simply do not want their world view upset. While it is far more rational to accept that there is something going on that we do not understand, they struggle to find ways to ignore the evidence. I thought that scientists had learnt their lessons after the errors of continental drift, but apparently not.

It is pleasing, though, that there were enough spirited scientists at the British Association for the Advancement of Science for the subject to get an airing.

PAUL McCOMBIE
Warminster, Wilts

Sir,

Yet again, certain selfappointed gatekeepers of science are attempting to halt progress by denying fellow scientists a platform to air their views. This is not about whether their views on paranormal phenomena are correct or not, but whether certain arrogant and influential people are allowed to prevent scientists such as myself from hearing controversial ideas. These gatekeepers should read up on the history of science and recognise the damage they could be doing.

MILTON WAINWRIGHT
University of Sheffield

Sir,

I think that telepathy exists and is based on natural electro-magnetic forces which we have as a race lost sight of and now only experience in times of acute need. During the war my wife and I, like many other couples, faced separation for an unknown period. Before embarkation we agreed to think of each other on the date and time of our marriage. Three months after each occasion I received a sea mail letter in India saying: "I felt your presence very strongly, but you were an hour early!" She was correct.

When much of the map was red, the Corps of Royal Engineers were responsible for finding water in remote areas. I was told by a brigadier that for decades they often paid local diviners when, as often happened, they demonstrated a genuine ability to find water.

ALAN SHAW
Norwich



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Scientists angered by telephone telepathy study

By Mark Henderson, Science Editor
London Times

A furious row broke out today at Britain's premier science forum over the decision to allow believers in the paranormal to promote their views without challenge from the mainstream.

The row was triggered by the British Association for the Advancement of Science's decision to showcase highly controversial research purporting to demonstrate telepathy and life after death.

Critics including Lord Winston and Sir Walter Bodmer, both past presidents of the BA, expressed particular alarm that three speakers who think paranormal phenomena are real were allowed to hold a press conference without challenge from sceptics. Some said telepathy has already been found wanting in experiments, and has no place at a scientific meeting.

Other scientists said that while discussion of the subject was acceptable, the panel's lack of balance was like inviting creationists to address the prestigious meeting without an opposing view from evolutionary biologists. Several members of the BA said that they would raise the matter with its ruling council.

Sir Walter, a geneticist and cancer researcher, said: "I'm amazed that the BA has allowed it to happen in this way. You have got to be careful not to suppress ideas, even if they are beyond the pale, but it's quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view."

The session on the paranormal featured three pieces of research, each of which claims to find evidence for phenomena that most scientists consider impossible under the laws of physics.

The first study, into telepathy, was conducted by Rupert Sheldrake, an unorthodox biologist whose work tends to inspire strong reactions among both supporters and critics.

Many people report experiences in which they were thinking of a friend or relative who happened to phone them at that moment. Most scientists regard this as coincidence, reinforced by forgetting the many times we think of friends who never ring, but Dr Sheldrake has tried to test whether it is actually down to genine telepathy.

He asked 63 volunteers to select four friends, one of whom would then be selected at random to ring them at a pre-arranged time. On picking up the phone, the subject would say who he thought was calling.

By chance alone, people should get the right friend 25 per cent of the time, but Dr Sheldrake found that they actually did much better than this, with a success rate of 40 per cent in 571 tries. Callers were often several miles away, sometimes thousands of miles away, and distance did not affect the outcome.

In a follow-up trial, the participants were videotaped to ensure they were not getting messages from their callers. The four subjects tested in this way did even better, picking the right caller 45 per cent of the time.

Dr Sheldrake claims the results as good evidence for genuine telepathy, at least between some people who know each other well. "The odds of this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one," he said.

But critics said that the effect was more likely to result from flaws in Dr Sheldrake's methods. In one set of studies, the subjects lifted the received before making their choice, allowing possible clues to the caller's identity from the quality of the line.

It was also possible that people got clues from the time of the call. "If the subject knows four people well, they will know who tends to be on time, who tends to be late and who early," said Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. "If they call me at 11.02 not 11, I'd likely guess it was going to be my late friend."

"He is reporting results that are far higher than those usually found by parapsychologists, and there is good reason to be sceptical. The design of the experiments are more messy than most in the field, and so the results could be due to participants picking up subtle cues from the callers - it is important that other scientists attempt to replicate the alleged effect."

Dr Sheldrake works independently, though he is currently funded with a grant from the Perrott-Warrick Fund, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge. His other work includes studies that claim to show blindfolded people can tell when they are being stared at, and that pets can communicate telepathically with their owners.

The second study reported yesterday was led by Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist who is interested in near-death experiences and "end of life experiences" that occur when people die. He thinks these may provide evidence for an afterlife.

Though his work is not yet published, he has collected data in hospices on apparently paranormal phenomena that occur at death. He says that many dying people experience visions of dead friends and relatives welcoming them to an afterlife, and that the living relatives of dying people are "visited" by them at the moment of death, reporting that they are dying but that all will be well.

Dr Fenwick has also documented uncanny events such as clocks stopping and bright lights at the moment of death. "One of commonest forms is a luminous object, composed of light and love, which hangs above the body. This is often interpreted as the soul leaving the body."

Again, sceptics reject this all as nothing but anecdote, hallucination and pure coincidence.

The third speaker at the symposium was Deborah Delanoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Northampton. Along with presenting an overview of the past 30 years of paranormal research, she discussed a study of her own in which volunteers are asked to try to arouse or calm down another person by thinking about them. Electrical activity on the skin is then measured to determine whether this has a direct effect.

Her experiments suggest that people can influnece others' physiology in this way, with success rates better than chance. This might demonstrate that thought can convey a "healing effect", though she is more cautious than the other researchers.

The event was organised by the Scientific and Medical Network, an organisation with about 3,000 members dedicated to"exploring the interface of science, medicine and spirituality". The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, said it "lies far from the scientific mainstram and the list of speakers reflect this".

Helen Haste, chair of the BA's programme organising committee, said that all three speakers have proper academic credentials and that though their work is controversial, it is conducted in a rigorous, scholarly fashion. Professor French's presence at the panel discussion would allow for sceptical dissent to be heard, though it was unfortunate he was not at the press event, she said.

"We feel at the BA that we should be open to discussions or debates that are seen as valid by people inside the scientific community, as long as they are addressed in acceptable ways. These seem to be phenomena that are commonly experienced but have not been subjected particularly effectively to scientific investigation. It is a legitimate area of research. I do think it's appropriate at a festival like this to have people who are serious about their approach and experimental methods."

Lord Winston, the fertility specialist, said: "It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields. It's something the BA should consider, whether a session like this should go unchallenged by regular scientists."

The BA, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, is a charity that seeks to to advance the public understanding, accessibility and accountability of the sciences and engineering. Its annual meeting, which is being held this year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has often caused controversy, most notably in 1860 when Thomas Huxley championed championed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution against Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford.

When asked whether he thought he was descended from apes on his mother's or father's side, Huxley responded:"I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop."



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The research that triggered the paranormal row

London Times
6 September 06

THE controversial session on the paranormal featured three pieces of research, each of which claims to find evidence for phenomena that most scientists consider impossible under the laws of physics.
Telepathy

The first study, into telepathy, was conducted by the controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Many people have reported experiences in which they were thinking of a friend or relative who happened to phone them at that moment. Most scientists regard this as coincidence, reinforced by forgetting the many times we think of friends who never ring, but Dr Sheldrake has tried to test whether it is down to genuine telepathy.

He asked 63 volunteers to select four friends, one of whom would then be selected at random to ring them at a pre-arranged time. On picking up the phone, the subject would say who he thought was calling.

By chance alone, people should get the right friend 25 per cent of the time, but Dr Sheldrake found that they did much better, with a success rate of 40 per cent in 571 attempts. Some callers were miles away - sometimes thousands of miles away - but distance did not affect the outcome. In a follow-up trial, the participants were videotaped to ensure that they were not getting messages from their callers. The four subjects tested in this way picked the right caller 45 per cent of the time.

Critics say his methods are flawed. In one set of studies, the subjects lifted the receiver before making their choice, allowing clues to the caller's identity from the quality of the line. It is also possible that people get clues from the time of the call. "If the subject knows four people well, they will know who tends to be on time, who tends to be late and who early," Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at Hertfordshire University, said.

Dr Sheldrake's other work includes studies claiming to show that blindfolded people can tell when they are being stared at, and that pets can communicate telepathically with their owners.

Afterlife

The second study reported yesterday was led by Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist who is interested in near-death and "end-of-life experiences" that occur as people are dying. He thinks these may provide evidence for an afterlife.

Although his work is not yet published, he has collected data in hospices on apparently paranormal phenomena. He says that many dying people experience visions of dead friends and relatives welcoming them to an afterlife, and that the relatives of dying people are "visited" by them at the moment of death.

He has also recorded events such as clocks stopping and bright lights at the moment of death. "One of commonest forms is a luminous object, composed of light and love, which hangs above the body. This is often interpreted as the soul leaving the body."

Again, sceptics reject this as nothing but a mixture of anecdote, hallucination and coincidence. Clocks may stop because nurses disturb them while checking the time for a death certificate, and death-bed visions can be attributed to drugs and the confusion of terminal illness.

In many cases where people report visitations, they know that a friend or relative is seriously ill and death is a strong possibility. The association with sleep also suggests "hypnopompic" hallucinations, which occur immediately after waking.

Paranormal

The third speaker was Deborah Delanoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Northampton.

Along with presenting an overview of the past 30 years of paranormal research, she discussed a study of her own in which volunteers were asked to try to arouse or calm another person just by thinking about them.

To determine whether this has an effect researchers measured electrical activity on the skin of the subject, in the same way as a polygraph liedetector test. Professor Delanoy's experiments suggest that people can influence the physiology of others in this way with success rates better than chance. This may demonstrate that thought can convey a "healing effect", but she is more cautious over the results than the other researchers.

As skin conductivity changes are usually not felt directly, she argues that many effects may occur primarily on an unconscious level, and could therefore be more common than most people think.



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Discussion between Rupert Sheldrake and Prof Peter Atkins - Atkins debunks but hasn't read the evidence!

BBC Radio Five Live
September 6, 2006

The discussion started with the interviewer asking Rupert to describe his work on telephone telepathy, and on his similar test with emails. Rupert described the results. In the videotaped telephone telepathy tests, the average hit rate was 45% compared with 25% expected by chance, with odds against this being a chance coincidence of billions to one (for Rupert's papers on telephone and email telepathy, see Scientific Papers )

The discussion continued as follows:

Interviewer: However let's talk to a leading scientist, Professor Peter Atkins, who is a biologist at Lincoln College Oxford. Professor Atkins why is all this a total waste of time in your view?

Atkins:
Well, you can't rely on any of these experiments. And by the way I'm a chemist not a biologist. But there is no serious work done in this field. The samples that people use are very tiny, the effects are statistically insignificant, the controls are not done in a scientific way. On the whole there's just no point in doing it. There are no serious reasons for believing there should be an effect of telepathy anyway. There is no mechanism within modern science to account for it. There's nothing that drives people to believe in it except sentiment, emotion, and things like that.

Interviewer:
Well it would be useful wouldn't it? I can think of all kinds of....

Atkins: Well this is the point, nature has been around for several billion years and the pressure of evolution and natural selection would have brought out telepathy to be one of the major senses, after all look what's happened to vision. Vision is enormously important to survival and several independent emergencies of vision and the optical system have occurred, but with telepathy it would be fantastic. You wouldn't need vision you'd just know what was to go on around you. The fact that evolution hasn't done it in a billion years seems to me to be really convincing evidence that it's all nonsense.

Interviewer: On the other hand when he produces his evidence, he said 25% was what you would expect, but what he got was 45%, that is remarkable.

Atkins: No, that's just playing with statistics.

Interviewer: Let's put that to Rupert. Rupert Sheldrake, he says you're just playing with statistics. He doesn't believe a word of it. What do you say to him?

Rupert: Well I'd like to ask him if he's actually read the evidence? May I ask you Professor Atkins if you've actually studied any of this evidence or any other evidence?

Atkins: No, but I would be very suspicious of it.

Rupert: Of course, being suspicious of it in advance of seeing it is normally called prejudice.

Atkins: Yes, there's always reason to believe in bizarre phenomena by looking into alternative explanations within the scientific milieu. For example people guessing, because of a particular time of day that someone's going to call.

Rupert: These tests exclude that, you seemed to have missed the point of the experiments. They're done by random selection. You know, I started from the kinds of objections you're putting forward, that's the starting point, then we try to go on and test those in rigorous scientific tests.

Atkins: But they're not rigorous.

Rupert: How do you know? You don't know a thing about it, you haven't looked at the evidence. I think you're talking from a point of view of prejudice, dogma and frankly lack of information. I would never presume to comment on your experiments in chemistry without reading them.

Atkins: But I've read your experiments in the past on other off the wall ideas that you've had.

Rupert: Have you? Well we can discuss any of those you'd like to.

Atkins: But none of them proved to be valid.

Interviewer: Thank you both very much... Anecdotally, I bet lots of listeners have had that funny feeling about the phone....



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The Reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe?

Adrian Finkelstein, MD

Adrian Finkelstein, MD, is a board certified psychiatrist who as been performing past life regressions as part of his practice for almost 30 years. Over six years ago, Dr. Finkelstein began working with Sherrie Lea Laird, who contacted him due to disturbing flashbacks of a past lifetime in which it appeared that she was Marilyn Monroe. After conducting extensive past life regressions, Dr. Finkelstein become convinced that Ms. Laird is indeed the reincarnation of Ms. Monroe, not only due to her memories, but also due to the presence of similarities in facial bone structure, hands, handwriting, voice pattern, linguistics and personality traits that exist between Marilyn Monroe and Sherrie Lea Laird.

Further, Dr. Finkelstein notes that Ted Jordan (deceased), a close friend of Ms. Monroe's and author of Norma Jean: My Secret Life with Marilyn Monroe, had extensive telephone conversations with Ms. Laird. Mr. Jordan also came to the conclusion that Ms. Laird is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.
Dr. Finkelstein's work is summarized in his recently released book, Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul, which was featured on CNN Showbiz Tonight in August 2006. Ms. Laird, who goes by the stage name, Sherrie Lea, is a singer whose production of No Ordinary Love hit the top of the charts in Canada and Europe. It is interesting to note that in her film Bus Stop, Marilyn's role was of a singer named Cherie.

As mentioned, Ms. Laird sought out Dr. Finkelstein after she started experiencing disturbing, intrusive flashbacks of her life as Marilyn Monroe. It is common in reincarnation cases that memories can be disturbing, as the individual does not have a context to understand the memories. As such, past life memories can interfere with life activities.

This type of reaction was also described in the Barbro Karlen/Anne Frank case. Barbro began having spontaneous memories at age three which were so vivid that she lived, in effect, a double life. Her parents, who were Christians, did not understand how Barbro could have memories of another lifetime and were made uncomfortable by her experiences, which resulted in emotional isolation for Barbro as a child. When the memories started to subside at age 15, Barbro experienced great relief, as she was now able to live life "just as Barbro."

In a similar way, Sherrie was distressed by these intrusive memories of a past lifetime and sought out Dr. Finkelstein, who had been performing past life regressions for over thiry years and who had written, Your Past Lives and the Healing Process: A Psychiatrist Looks at Reincarnation and Spiritual Healing, first published in 1985. Dr. Finkelstein's own history is quite dramatic and lends credibility to the reincarnation case of Marilyn Monroe/Sherrie Lea Laird.

Dr. Finkelstein grew up in Communist Rumania at the end of the WWII. Due to the anti-Semitism that was characteristic of Rumania at that time, through great effort, Dr. Finkelstein and his family immigrated to Israel in the winter of 1960-61. His family was poor and he describes walking through the snow in torn shoes as his family made the rounds to make the necessary bribes to Communist officials, to get the needed paperwork to depart. To prepare for their planned move to Israel, Dr. Finkelstein taught himself Hebrew in secret, as it was illegal to study Hebrew in Romania.

Though the competition was great, Dr. Finkelstein was admitted to the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School. It was here that he first was exposed to hypnosis, which was used by a mentor to treat severe cases of asthma. Dr. Finkelstein witnessed how hypnosis could be used to stop severe asthma attacks in an almost miraculous way, which made a great impression on him. In 1967, Dr. Finkelstein served as a medical officer in the Six Day War, treating Israelis and Arabs alike. He won his MD in 1968.

After moving to the United States, Dr. Finkelstein was accepted at the Menninger School of Psychiatry, which at the time, was one of the premiere psychiatric training institutes in the world. While at Menninger, Dr. Finkelstein cured one of his mentors of chronic, severe migraine headaches through hypnosis. After he graduated from Menniger, Dr. Finkelstein was given the Directorship of Outpatient Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, and in addtion took on the position Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Chicago Medical School, University of Health Sciences in Chicago. He later became Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Finkelstein also undertook personal analysis for about 700 hours with a training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Chicago. During this time in Chicago, Dr. Finkelstein started doing past life regression therapy.

I cite Dr. Finkelstein's history and qualifications so that the reader with understand that he is an experienced psychiatrist and past life regression therapist who would easily distinguish genuine past life memories from fabricated memories, which makes the Marilyn Monroe/Sherry Lea Laird case all the more compelling. In his upcoming book, Dr. Finkelstein explains how Ms. Laird, who happens to be an excellent hypnotic subject, was guided into a "somnambulistic hypnotic state," characterized by specific features, such as a "waxy face," resulting from deeply relaxed facial musculature, which cannot be faked. Information obtained in this state is considered to be truthful, which is one reason why Dr. Finkelstein believes that Ms. Laird is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

One question that is often asked is why is it that it seems that everyone thinks they are someone famous in a past lifetime? The truth is that most people were not famous in past lives. Many times, when a psychic or a person gets an intuitive hit that an individual was a famous person in a past lifetime, in actually, the famous person is acting as a "landmark" for that incarnation. For example, a psychic may get the impression that a client was Cleopatra in a past lifetime, when in actuality, the client was Cleopatra's advisor, maid or acquaintance. The psychic can't come up with the client's specific name or identity in that era, so the closet, most prominent individual in that era, Cleopatra, pops into the psychic's mind. I call these "landmark associations," as the famous person acts as a landmark for a person's past lifetime.

On the other hand, famous people have to reincarnate just like everyone else and recent reincarnation research indicates that people reincarnate very quickly, almost continually. If this is true, then we would expect people such as Marilyn Monroe and Anne Frank to be reincarnated at this point in time.

Some of the best reincarnation research has been done by Ian Stevenson, MD, at the University of Virginia, who made a career out of studying children who have spontaneous memories of past lives. Two key Stevenson cases have been published in the book Old Souls, written by journalist Tom Shroder. These two cases involve individuals from Lebanon, Suzanne Ghanem and Daniel Jurdi. Stevenson first studied Ghanem and Jurdi when they were approximately 3 years old, when they began having spontaneous memories of past lifetimes.

Each child gave their biologic parents enough specific information, such as their past life family names and villages of origin, that the biologic parents were able to reunite the children with their past life families. When reunited, the child could identify past life family members by name and they knew secrets that no one outside of the past life family knew. The knowledge of these children, Suzanne Ghanem and Daniel Jurdi, was so impressive, that their past life families accepted them as the reincarnation of their deceased family members.

Dr. Stevenson studied the Ghanem and Jurdi over 25 years ago, when they were young children. In their past lives, Suzanne Ghanem's name was Hanan Monsour and Daniel Jurdi's name was Rashid Khaddege. In 1998, Stevenson revisited Ghanem and Jurdi, who were now adults. A dramatic finding was that Ghanem and Jurdi, as adults, have the same physical appearance, the same facial features, as they did when they were adults in their previous lives.

The assertion that people reincarnate quickly, almost continually, is supported by the fact that Suzanne Ghanem was born only 10 days after Hanan Monsour died. Daniel Jurdi was born approximately a year after Rashid Khaddege died. The cases of Hanan Monsour/Suzanne Ghanem and Rashid Khaddege/Daniel Jurdi are featured in more detail in Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited, as well as in Tom Shroder's, Old Souls.

This observation that people have the same facial features from lifetime to lifetime has been corroborated in many other independently researched reincarnation cases, many of which are featured on this website, such as the cases of neurosurgeon Norm Shealy, Police Captain Robert Snow, Fire Chief Jeff Keene, William Barnes and the case of Barbro Karlen/Anne Frank.

How do we validate past life matches as accurate matches? In validating a past life case, the following criteria should be met:

* Facial Features should be consistent from lifetime to lifetime
* Personality traits are similar. Oftentimes passions and talents are consistent from lifetime to lifetime.
* Linguistic writing style is consistent, as demonstrated in the case of Jeff Keene, where a formal linguistic analysis showed that writing structure in successive lifetimes is consistent
* People incarnate in karmic groups, so friends and family present in a prior lifetime should be found in one's contemporary circle.

Another method of validation that I have used is confirming the case through Kevin Ryerson, the trance medium who has been featured in three of Shirley MacLaine's books, who has demonstrated an ability to make accurate past life matches. Past life matches featured on this web site that were made through Mr. Ryerson include those of Ralph Nader, Carl Sagan and Oprah Winfrey.

The case of Marilyn Monroe/Sherrie Lea Laird, meets all the criteria listed above and as such, I too support it as a valid reincarnation case. For an in depth understainding of the story of Sherrie Lea Laird, please read Dr. Finkelstein's beautifully produced book, Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul.



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Bush's America


Welcome to the Fourth Reich

By Thomas C Greene in Dublin
The Register
Wednesday 18th October 2006

"It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives; I have that privilege this morning," US President George W Bush trilled as he consigned 200 years of judicial oversight to the scrap heap of history.

For the bill that he signed with such evident satisfaction has relieved the federal courts of their rights and duty to hear petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, which allow prisoners to challenge their confinement under Constitutional principles.
The new law, called the Military Commissions Act of 2006, will allow rough treatment during interrogations, so long as the President designates a practice not to be torture. But he is permitted to "interpret" international law forbidding torture to suit himself.

The government, not the courts, will now be deciding what is cruel and inhumane treatment. Only monstrous abuse, reaching the level of a war crime, such as rape, mutilation, and the like, are expressly forbidden. And prisoners will not be granted legal counsel during interrogations.

The law will allow hearsay evidence and even coerced testimony to be admitted at trial, so long as a judge deems it relevant and reliable. Evidence obtained through torture cannot be used but, as noted above, the government will have plenty of latitude in defining torture, and it is inevitable that testimony will be obtained through force or threats of force, and permitted at trial.

The law empowers the military to detain any foreigner it wishes to call an unlawful enemy combatant. And yet it fails to address the thousands of prisoners socked away in ratholes in Iraq: it applies only to those prisoners whom the government wishes to try in its kangaroo courts - otherwise known as military commissions.

It is the most un-American piece of legislation passed since the so-called "Patriot" Act. But it is a "vital tool" in the war on terror, the President insisted, using his stock slogan for all of the administration's various assaults upon proper judicial process and civil liberties. Massive electronic dragnets and wiretaps are a "vital tool". Warrantless searches are a "vital tool". Holding thousands of prisoners in an extra-judicial limbo is a "vital tool".

And here we have another, rubber-stamped by a spineless Republican Congress. "With the bill I'm about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice," the President gushed as he prepared to make the legislation law.

Donald Rumsfeld was there, looking quite satisfied. In a sense, he had just been given a promotion. He is now, effectively, the Supreme Court for a shadow judiciary. It is a quite illegal one, Congressional blessing or no, but the question remains: will the real Supreme Court stand up and make it right?



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New US anti-terror law undermines international law: ICRC

AFP
October 19, 2006

GENEVA - The International Committee of the Red Cross said that a controversial new anti-terror law approved by
President George W. Bush this week undermined international humanitarian law.

ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger warned that the Military Commissions Act "disrupts" part of the Geneva Conventions that are regarded as "elementary considerations of humanity".
"Our preliminary reading of the new legislation raised news concerns and questions," Kellenberger said in an interview published on the humanitarian agency's website.

The new law signed by Bush on Tuesday allows secret overseas
CIA prisons, harsh interrogation practices and military trials as weapons against suspected terrorists.

The measure, which US lawmakers approved last month after a bitter election-year debate over national security and civil liberties, also allows the United States to detain alleged terrorists indefinitely, US officials said.

Kellenberger raised concerns about the "very broad definition" of "'an unlawful enemy combatant' and the fact that there is not an explicit prohibition on the admission of evidence obtained by coercion".

The new US law also omitted parts of a key section common to all parts of the Geneva Conventions, Article 3, prohibiting humiliating and degrading treatment and denial of the right to fair trial, while retaining others, Kellenberger said.

"This distinction between the different violations disrupts the integrity of common Article three."

"Over time, the protections enunciated in common Article three came to be regarded as so fundamental to preserving humanity in war that its rules are now referred to as "elementary considerations of humanity" that must be observed in any type of armed conflict," the ICRC chief added.

Kellenberger underlined that it was "a minimum" that countries are bound to apply in its entirety.

Until now, US authorities have explicitly upheld Article three of the Geneva Conventions, notably recognising it as "the minimum legal standard applicable to persons detained in the fight against terrorism" after a Supreme Court ruling in June, he added.

The interview also dealt with a recent US Department of Defense directive on detention and a new Army field manual on interrogation, as well as the disclosure of the CIA detention programme.

"The ICRC is carefully examining these developments and is in a dialogue with the US Government regarding the legal and practical impact they could have," Kellenberger said.

Kellenberger welcomed the recent transfer of 14 terror suspects from secret detention to the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, where they were visited by Red Cross delegates last week to check on their conditions.

"This is perhaps the issue on which the change has been most significant," he said.

"The US authorities have also said that there are no longer any persons held in undisclosed CIA places of detention."



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Who Is 'Any Person' in Tribunal Law?

by Robert Parry
opednews.com
October 19, 2006

The New York Times lead editorial gives false comfort to American citizens by assuring them that they will not be victims of George W. Bush's new draconian system for prosecuting enemies of the U.S. government in military tribunals outside constitutional protections.
"This law does not apply to American citizens," the Times editorial stated, "but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening." [NYT, Oct. 19, 2006]

However, the Times analysis appears to be far too gentle. While it's true that some parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 target non-citizens, other sections clearly apply to U.S. citizens as well, putting citizens inside the same tribunal system with resident aliens and foreigners.

"Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission," according to the law, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in September and signed by Bush on Oct. 17.

Another provision of the law states that "any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy [presumably U.S. military allies, such as Great Britain and Israel], shall be punished as a military commission ... may direct." [Emphases added]

If the Times is correct that "this law does not apply to American citizens," why does it contain language referring to "any person" and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting "in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States"?

Who has "an allegiance or duty to the United States" if not an American citizen? That provision would not presumably apply to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, nor would it apply generally to foreign citizens. This section of the law appears to be singling out American citizens.

Court-Stripping

Though the new law specifically strips non-U.S. citizens of habeas corpus - the right to a fair trial - American citizens caught up in Bush's legal system also would be denied the right to challenge their incarceration.

Besides allowing for "any person" to go into Bush's system, the law prohibits detainees once inside the system from appealing to the traditional American courts until a defendant is fully prosecuted and sentenced, which could translate into an indefinite imprisonment since there are no timetables for Bush's tribunal process to play out.

The law states that once a person is detained, "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever ... relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions."

That court-stripping provision - barring "any claim or cause of action whatsoever" - would seem to deny American citizens habeas corpus rights just as it does for non-citizens. If a person can't file a motion with a court, he can't assert any constitutional rights, including habeas corpus.

Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights - such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail and the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" - would seem to be beyond an American detainee's reach as well.

Though the New York Times suggests that the new law "chips away at the foundations of the judicial system," the law actually seems to obliterate the old judicial system.

Secret Trials

By putting detainees, apparently including American citizens outside the U.S. constitutional process, Bush's system makes a mockery of the Sixth Amendment in particular. It reads:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed ... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; [and] to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses."

By contrast, in Bush's system, there are no guarantees of either a speedy or a public trial. Secrecy dominates in a process run by U.S. military officers whose careers depend on the favor of the Commander in Chief.

Under the new law, the military judge "may close to the public all or a portion of the proceedings" if he deems that the evidence must be kept secret for national security reasons. Those concerns can be conveyed to the judge through ex parte - or one-sided - communications from the prosecutor or a government representative.

The judge also can exclude the accused from the trial if there are safety concerns or if the defendant is disruptive. Plus, the judge can admit evidence obtained through coercion if he determines it "possesses sufficient probative value" and "the interests of justice would best be served by admission of the statement into evidence."

The law permits, too, the introduction of secret evidence "while protecting from disclosure the sources, methods, or activities by which the United States acquired the evidence if the military judge finds that ... the evidence is reliable."

During trial, the prosecutor would have the additional right to assert a "national security privilege" that could stop "the examination of any witness," presumably by the defense if the questioning touched on any sensitive matter.

In effect, what the new law appears to do is to create a parallel "star chamber" system for the prosecution, imprisonment and elimination of enemies of the state, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.

Terror Fears

The Times editorial writers might also take into account the circumstances under which Bush is likely to execute his new powers. Imagine, for example, a terrorist incident or a threat of one somewhere in the United States. Amid public anger and fear, Bush or some future President could begin rounding up citizens and non-citizens alike.

Once these detainees are locked up at Guantanamo Bay or some other prison facility, they could be held incommunicado and denied access to civilian courts under the law's court-stripping provision.

It could take years before the U.S. Supreme Court even addresses these detentions and - given the increasingly right-wing make-up of the Court - there would be no assurance that the justices wouldn't endorse the President's extraordinary powers.

The Times also might want to take note of the curious provision in the law that would jail "any person" who "collects or attempts to collect information by clandestine means or while acting under false pretenses, for the purpose of conveying such information to an enemy of the United States."

Since the Bush administration and its political allies often have accused the New York Times of collecting and publishing information, from confidential sources, that is helpful to U.S. enemies - for instance, the stories about Bush's secret wiretapping program - this provision arguably could apply to Times reporters and editors.

This "spying" provision not only puts alleged offenders into Bush's special legal system but it could result in the offenders being sentenced to death.

So, before assuring American citizens that they're safe from Bush's draconian system, the Times editors might check on why these "any person" provisions were put into the law. For more than two centuries, the civilian U.S. legal system has handled similar crimes, including allegations of spying and charges of Americans aiding foreign enemies.

Yet now, under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called "unlawful enemy combatants," Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have effectively created a parallel legal system for "any person" - American citizen or otherwise - who crosses some line and becomes an enemy of the state.

The Times editors may believe that to raise these concerns is alarmist. But over the past six years, Bush and his administration have routinely stretched legal language to aggrandize their power, not the other way around.

There are a multitude of reasons to think that Bush will now interpret every legal ambiguity in the new law in his favor, as granting him the broadest possible powers over people he perceives as his enemies.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'



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Travel pass card will help at the border: American ambassador

Last Updated: Friday, October 20, 2006 | 12:39 AM ET
CBC News

The U.S. ambassador to Canada promised a Toronto audience on Thursday that a proposed high-tech identification card for Americans would speed up cross-border travel.

David Wilkins also told the Toronto Board of Trade crowd that the U.S. government has listened to the concerns from politicians and business groups in both countries over the possible negative impact on tourism and commerce of new border requirements.
Washington's Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative would require all Canadians and Americans entering the U.S. by air, land and sea to carry a passport or other secure identification card by June 2009. The implementation was originally slated for the beginning of 2007 for air and sea travel, and 2008 for land crossings.

"I think it's important for Canada to understand that your concerns were heard loud and clear and, in my opinion, those concerns were honoured by the delay," Wilkins said.

Wilkins added that it was possible the plan could be rolled out ahead of schedule.

The U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security officially announced on Tuesday their plans for a wallet-sized passport card, good for 10 years.
Continue Article

The card will use radio frequency identification technology to link the card to a database containing biographical data and a photograph.

"By the time you pull up, they'll have checked you out," Wilkins said.

The system will be faster than using passports, since border guards won't have to flip through and stamp pages, he said, adding that frequent visitors and commercial trucks would have special lanes.

'By the time you pull up, they'll have checked you out.'-Ambassador David Wilkins

Wilkins said he is not putting any pressure on Ottawa to implement their own travel card.

"That obviously is a decision for Canada to make and Canada alone to make."

Passports, which are currently used by about 23 per cent of Americans, cost about $100 US.

The proposed wallet-sized card would cost $10 for children and $20 for adults, plus a $25 administrative fee.

In addition to Canada, the U.S. government will require the card for Americans travelling to Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.



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N.Y. man assaulted with plumbing snake

AP
October 19, 2006

YAPHANK, N.Y. - A mentally disabled handyman was hospitalized after two teenagers sexually brutalized him with a plumbing snake at the Long Island bowling alley where he worked, police said Thursday.

One of the attackers, who had been bullying the victim for several years, twisted the plumbing tool so far into his rectum that it had to be removed during a surgical procedure that took several hours, police said. The 21-year-old man was reported in stable condition.
"This was a cruel and sadistic crime with no other purpose but to torture another human being," Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said.

Steven Rodriguez, 19, and Michael Lunsford, 17, were arrested this week and charged with aggravated sexual abuse, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. Both pleaded not guilty. Rodriguez was jailed on $200,000 bail, Lunsford on $500,000.

A call to Lunsford's attorney's office went unanswered. It was not immediately clear who represented Rodriguez.

The victim was accosted in the bathroom of the bowling alley, held down by one of the teenagers and sodomized with the plumbing tool by the other in the Sunday night attack, Dormer said.

A plumbing snake is used to unclog drains.



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Fla. teen dies in stabbing at bus stop

AP
October 20, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. - A 15-year-old student was fatally stabbed at a central Florida high school Thursday after he and another teen got in a fight over a girl, authorities said.

Authorities have charged a 17-year-old in the stabbing, which took place at a school bus stop at University High School in eastern Orange County.
An argument between the two students over a girl began during lunchtime and continued after school at the bus stop, where Michael Nieves was stabbed with a pocket knife, Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary said.

Nieves was taken to a hospital in critical condition but was pronounced dead shortly afterward.

A school resource officer caught Kelvin De La Cruz, 17, in a second-floor classroom, authorities said.

De La Cruz was charged as an adult with first-degree murder in the stabbing, sheriff's office spokesman Jim Solomons said. It was not immediately known whether the teen had an attorney.

About 3,600 students attend the school.

Beary said the sheriff's gang unit had been asked to investigate whether the incident was gang-related, but he added that neither student had a criminal record.



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FBI: Missing baby found; mother and boyfriend arrested

CNN
October 20, 2006

A Kentucky couple suspected of abducting a 9-month-old boy after beating to death the child's social worker were apprehended Thursday near Godfrey, Illinois, according to police and FBI officials.
"We're very relieved," said Detective John Nevels of the Henderson, Kentucky, Police Department. The abduction and slaying occurred in Henderson.

The couple were found hiding in a trailer near Godfrey, about 25 miles north of St. Louis and 200 miles west-northwest of Henderson. No weapons were found at the scene and the couple offered no resistance.

Police said social worker Boni Frederick's broken-down car was found nearby. Her cell phone was also recovered.

Saige Terrell "has been examined by a physician," said FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Stafford, "and is in good health."

Authorities had been searching for the infant's mother, Renee Terrell, 33, of Henderson, and her boyfriend, Christopher Luttrell, 23, since Monday after Frederick's body was found in the home where she had brought the baby for a visit with his mother.

Officials said the boy was taken from Terrell soon after birth because of neglect.

An autopsy showed Frederick, 67, had been beaten to death.

"Both subjects are suspects in this homicide," said Nevels. "We expect probably sometime tomorrow ... that we'll be filing murder warrants on both these subjects."

An Amber Alert was issued for the child on Monday, shortly after Frederick's body was found.

Frederick had worked with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) for 15 years. As a social service aide, she transported children to and from family visits and doctor's appointments.

CHFS spokeswoman Vikki Franklin acknowledged that it is common practice for social aides to travel alone. "But if a worker should be concerned about safety, he or she can request an escort by a police officer or another social worker."

But another social worker said such escorts are rarely requested because workers are typically so pressed that they don't have the time to arrange for an escort. (Are social workers at risk?)

Frederick's co-workers reported her missing.

Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher ordered flags at all state office buildings to be lowered to half-staff in memory of Frederick.

"The first lady and I extend our deepest sympathies to the family, friends and co-workers of Boni Frederick, a social service worker who died tragically Monday in the line of duty," Fletcher said. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who has been touched by this tragedy."



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Zionism vs. The World


Israeli leaders 'group of terrorists'

10/20/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)


Tehran: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel's leaders "a group of terrorists" and threatened any country that supported the Jewish state.

In a speech made on Friday Ahmadinejad sent out a warning to the United States and its allies, saying, "You imposed a group of terrorists on the region."

He added, "It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals. This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."
Ahmadinejad told thousands of people gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital of Tehran that "nations will take revenge," adding that Israel no longer had any reason to exist.

He said, "Efforts to stabilise this fake (Israeli) regime, by the grace of God, have completely failed. You should believe that this regime is disappearing."

Ahmadinejad also branded a decision taken by the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran for its uranium enrichment as "illegitimate".



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Israel Refuses to Recognize R. Abramovich and Putin "Jokes" with microphones unplugged

By: Andrey Kolesnikov
20.10.2006

Summary: The Russian daily Kommersant printed several of Putin's comments made at the Kremlin when he thought the microphones had been turned off. "Give my best to your president. Come on, big guy! Rape a dozen women! We didn't think he would do it. He has surprised us all. We're all jealous of him," Putin said yesterday in a meeting with the Iraeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. According to Kommersant, Putin said these comments after the first greetings were exchanged between the two delegations, when the press had left the room and he believed all the microphones had been unplugged.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and expressed his sympathy for Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who faces charges of serial rape. Putin also offered the services of Roman Abramovich in moving the court out of the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. Olmert passed on that offer of fraternal aid, however, and Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov noted with shock hints of a new arms race.

The Israelis arrives in a large delegation of negotiators and journalists. At first there was no enough room behind the table at the Kremlin for Israeli Ambassador to Russia Arkady Mil-Man, who was insistently requesting to participate in the negotiations, if only as a translator. Finally the Russians consented to put him on the list of translators. But when everyone was seated at the table and Russian President Vladimir Putin asked them to introduce themselves, Mil-Man confounded protocol by saying that he was the Israeli ambassador and not a translator. Ambassadors' participation was not foreseen and the Russian ambassador to Israel had not even come back to Moscow. The others at the table looked offended at the need to introduce themselves publicly.

The Russian president, the only person at the table who did not introduce himself in the end, began his short presentation with "Shalom!" and warm recollection of former prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Olmert responded by saying that Sharon placed a high value on his relations with Putin and recalled their last meeting, in Jerusalem a year and a half ago. "I remember the last meeting when you met with Mr. Sharon," he said. "I was present at the dinner that the Israeli Prime Minister held in your honor. I remember the important things that you said to us then about the nature of relations between Russia and Israel and about your personal commitment to ensuring that Russia's relations with the countries of the Middle East would never again be one-sided. I very much value your position on this issue."

After that, the press was ushered out, and the president apparently thought the microphones had been turned off. "Say hi to your president," Putin said. "He turned out to be quite a powerful person! Raped ten women! We're all amazed. We all envy him!"

Sometimes you just don't believe your ears. Putin was obviously expressing support for Olmert, who had been put in a difficult position by the Israeli president's alleged actions.

The negotiations lasted three hours behind closed doors and turned-off microphones. According to information obtained by Kommersant, the Russian side raised the question of Russian arms passing from Syrian possession to the hands of Hezbollah. They had Russian-made thermal imaging devices on their launchers, and Kornet-E, Konkurs-M, Fagot, Metis-M and RPG-29 antitank systems, causing the Israelis unexpectedly heavy losses in the recent war. Russian negotiators, according to a high-placed source, explained that they came into Hezbollah's possession through the third party of unethical Syrian officers during Syria's chaotic withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005.

The most important thing, the source continued, was that the Russians showed the Israelis that Hezbollah has even more American weapons, and even Israeli.

Another topic of hot interest to the Russians was the Israeli court that has been situated for many years in buildings belonging to the Russian Orthodox mission in Jerusalem. Israel has been unable to find the money to move the court. Putin suggested that there was a Russian businessman who could solve that problem and mentioned Roman Abramovich. But Olmert said that he would prefer to keep the negotiations on that issue on a state level.

At the press conference after the negotiations, Olmert spoke of his concern over Iran. "We do not have the privilege of being able to afford to let a country like Iran possess non-conventional weapons. Israel will never accept such a situation. If the leader of a country like Iran says publicly that he seeks to annihilate our country, we cannot prepare a response scenario but must prevent this from ever happening," Olmert stated ominously.



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Terror suspect says CIA recruited him

By MIKE ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer Thu Oct 19, 9:13 PM ET

CHICAGO - A former university professor charged with plotting to bankroll Hamas terrorists was once asked by the
CIA whether he wanted a job as a spy, his attorney told a jury Thursday.

Abdelhaleem Ashqar, 48, apparently never pursued the idea. But his defense attorneys say the offer shows federal agents were eager to recruit him to spy on fellow Palestinians before doing an about-face and indicting him.
Attorney William Moffitt showed jurors a June 17, 1996, letter on CIA stationary telling Ashqar, then a post-graduate business student at the University of Mississippi, that he might want a clandestine services job.

"Operations officers serve overseas as collectors of information," the letter said. It told him to "tick the box below" to pursue such a job.

But Moffitt said that when the job was suggested, federal agents already had searched his house, found the documents and tapped his phone.

Ashqar, of Alexandria, Va., and suburban Chicago grocer Muhammad Salah, 53, are charged in a four-count racketeering indictment with furnishing thousands of dollars and fresh recruits to the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, which has been officially designated a terrorist group by the federal government.

The indictment was announced in August 2004 in Washington by John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who called the men prime movers in "a U.S.-based terrorism recruiting and financing cell." The trial is expected to take three months, and expected witnesses include Israeli security agents.

Also charged in the indictment but absent and classified as a fugitive is Mousa Abu Marzook, described by federal officials as the deputy chief of the political section of Hamas - which since winning an election last January has controlled the government of the Palestinian territories.

Ashqar is accused of funneling money destined for Hamas fighters in Israel in the Palestinian territories through his U.S. bank accounts and making his home an archive of Hamas documents.

Moffitt and Salah's attorney, Michael E. Deutsch, portrayed the two defendants as men who funneled money not to terrorists but to the poor and the downtrodden of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip suffering under Israeli occupation.



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Legitimacy of Hamas debated in US terrorist financing trial

by Mira Oberman
AFP
Fri Oct 20, 2006

CHICAGO (AFP) - The legitimacy of the militant group Hamas was debated in a US courtroom under the watchful eye of an anxious Palestinian-American community.

Prosecutors accused two Arab-Americans of supporting murder and mayhem in Israel by helping funnel money to and coordinate the activities of Hamas, which swept to power in January elections this year but remains designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

Defense attorneys said the men were participating in a legitimate resistance movement and trying to deliver much-need humanitarian aid to those suffering under occupation.
Many in the Arab-American community see the case as part of a broader crackdown on Muslims living in the United States and an erosion of constitutional guarantees of due process and a fair trial.

"It's a case the community feels is just the beginning," Bassel Abushaban told AFP after watching opening arguments with around 50 other Palestinian-Americans.

"Everyone is afraid of even thinking about helping their families," he said. "The message that is coming out of this is that any organization that is helping the Palestinian people is going to be shut down."

Chicago grocer Muhammad Salah spent nearly five years in an Israeli prison in the mid-1990s after admitting he committed a number of crimes on behalf of Hamas.

Prosecutors say those statements prove his fund-raising activities in the United States were aimed at violent ends. His defense team argues that they were obtained by torture.

Former business professor Abdelhaleem Ashqar was twice jailed in the United States for refusing to testify to a grand jury about the activities of Hamas.

His defense team said he is a peaceful activist targeted for refusing to spy for the US government. Prosecutors say he served as a top secretary, redirecting money and information from his Mississippi home and organizing high-level strategy meetings.

"Hamas is not a legitimate political organization just trying to make a difference," prosecutor Carrie Hamilton told the jury.

"Hamas is a sophisticated global terrorist organization," she said. "Although the violence happened in Israel ... the funding and the planning happened right here in the United States by members like Muhammad Salah and defendant Ashqar."

Hamilton said these two men actively coordinated activities with Musa Marzook, a senior Hamas figure also named in the indictment who is considered a fugitive living in Syria.

Defense attorneys noted that the crimes they have been accused of participating in occurred before the United State designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Salah's attorney gave jurors a lengthy description of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and compared Hamas to the French resistance under the Nazis and the African National Congress' struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

"Any time you have an occupation there is going to be a resistance," Michael Deutsche told jurors. "You may disagree with that, but that doesn't make them terrorists."

He said Hamas was far more than a resistance movement. It operated schools, day care centers, sports clubs and other social organizations and - unlike the corrupt Palestinian Liberation Organization - could be counted upon not to skim off the top of charitable donations. It was these humanitarian activities that Salah supported, Deutsche said.

Ashqar's attorney painted the case as a crack down on US guarantees of freedom of expression and association.

"Dr. Ashqar sought to change our ideas about what was right in Palestine and Israel," William Moffitt told the jury.

"There is nothing illegal about opposition. There is nothing illegal about organizing that opposition."

Both men face a maximum of life in prison on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges.



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U.N. envoy: Gaza situation 'explosive'

By EDITH M. LEDERER,
Associated Press Writer
Thu Oct 19, 11:15 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS - The continuing violence and near-closure of Gaza coupled with the lack of any apparent political solution "is truly explosive" and as potentially dangerous for both Israelis and Palestinians, the U.N. Mideast envoy warned Thursday.

Alvaro de Soto told the U.N. Security Council that a national unity government "offers the most credible opportunity - indeed, perhaps the only one - to stem the slide into anarchy" for the Palestinians and restore basic law and order.
Months of contacts to bring the current Hamas-led government and President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party into a national unity government have broken down over Hamas' refusal to accept international demands to recognize Israel, renounce violence and endorse past peace accords.

De Soto said donors should signal their readiness "to re-engage if there is a genuine movement" toward a national unity government that embraces the international demands, which are backed by the so-called Quartet that drafted the stalled roadmap to Mideast peace - the U.N., the U.S., the
European Union and Russia.

"Palestinian society is teetering between national unity one day and civil conflict the next," de Soto said. "The
Palestinian Authority ... has for several months been governed by a president and a prime minister with divergent programs, and has been polarized by deadly clashes between rival security forces."

At the same time, he said, Israel's military operations in Gaza intensified after the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, and the killing of two others by Hamas-linked militants who crossed from Gaza into Israel.

"The combination of near total closure of the Gaza Strip, non-payment of public sector salaries, absence of basic law and order, declining service delivery, continued military strikes by air and land, and the lack of any apparent political horizon is a truly explosive one - as potentially dangerous for Israel as it is currently dangerous for Palestinians," de Soto said.

Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman told the council that hostilities in Gaza have escalated with the increase in rocket attacks against Israel "launched by Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip" which have traumatized civilians whose only wish is to live in peace and security.

The Palestinian U.N. observer, Riyad Mansour, accused Israel of terrorizing the people of Gaza by conducting "a ferocious campaign" which has killed innocent women and children and displaced thousands.



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Israel: War with Hezbollah changes rule of game in Lebanon

www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-20 05:08:02

JERUSALEM, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Foreign Minister TzipiLivni said Thursday that Israel's July-August war with Lebanese Hezbollah has had its mark in that country as Lebanese officials had called for peace talks with Israel, local newspaper Jerusalem Post reported.

"There is no doubt that (the war) dramatically changed the rule of the game in Lebanon, and the best proof of that is the Lebanese parliament speaker's statement and other voices that are being heard in Lebanon," Livni was quoted as saying.
Berri, who is also the leader of the Amal movement which competes with Hezbollah for the support of Lebanon's Shi'ite population, told al-Arabiya newspaper Thursday in Paris that "now is the time to raise the issue to returning to peace negotiations(with Israel)."

It is the first time that Berri called in public for peace talks with Israel.

Livni believed that Israel would gain further strategic achievement if Berri's appealing lead to diplomatic negotiations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also responded during his visit to Russia, saying that he would be happy to meet with "(Prime Minister Fouad) Siniora or any other Lebanese government official who is authorized to talk peace with Israel."

Israel began launching military offensives in south Lebanon on July 12 after Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others during cross-border attacks.

The 34-day-long Israel-Hezbollah conflict ended on Aug. 14 after Israel agreed to bow to a UN-brokered truce without retrieving the two captive soldiers and disarming the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.



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Hezbollah deny using cluster rockets

10/20/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)

Beirut: Hezbollah has denied claims from a human rights group that its fighters fired cluster rockets into civilian areas of northern Israel during the recent war.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it had been told by Israeli police of over 100 documented cases of cluster rocket strikes.
In an interview with the BBC, Hezbollah MP Hassan Hoballah denied the claims. He said, "We did not use these bombs. We don't have them."

He added: "We reject the use of these bombs anywhere in the world because they hurt civilians, especially when dropped on residential areas. Our stance is consistent. It can never change."

The recent report by HRW said both Israel and Hezbollah fired cluster rockets. It read, "We are disturbed to discover that not only Israel but also Hezbollah used cluster munitions in their recent conflict, at a time when many countries are turning away from this kind of weapon because of its impact on civilians."



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Lebanon may use force against violations

10/20/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)

Beirut: United Nations peacekeepers may use force to prevent repeated violations of Lebanese airspace by Israel, the commander of the UN force in Lebanon said on Thursday.

But Major General Alain Pellegrini said to do this would require the UN to change the rules of engagement for its troops.

Speaking at a news conference Pellegrini said that although reports of violations against Lebanese airspace had declined recently, they remained a problem and were "not to be accepted".
He said, "At the moment we have not other means to prevent this kind of violation beyond dialogue and diplomatic ways," he said. But if diplomacy was not enough, "maybe it could be considered other ways."

Anti-aircraft missiles held by the French contingent of the UN force are now reserved solely for self-defence, but Pellegrini said this could change if the rules of engagement were revised.

He said, "It could be. It could be. This has to be considered."

UN officials stressed that there was no plans at the moment to rewrite the rules of engagement.

The comments angered Israeli UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman, who said he could not believe Pellegrini would make such a statement.

Pellegrini also told the conference that the UN had seen no evidence of illegal arms being smuggled in from Syria.



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The Buck Stops Here


Russia to diversify foreign exchange reserves

By Gary Duncan
Sunday Times Economics Editor
October 17, 2006

RUSSIA is to diversify further its foreign exchange reserves, the world's third-largest, and will begin to add the yen to its currency stockpile, its central bank said yesterday.

With Russia's reserves expanding rapidly thanks to huge inflows of funds generated by being the world's second-biggest oil exporter, the central bank said it wanted to widen the range of currencies it holds.

Record oil prices have combined with Russia's energy riches to swell its foreign exchange holdings by 54 per cent this year, so that its total reserves are outstripped only by those of China and Japan.

Sergei Ignatyev, the central bank's chairman, said that about half the total reserves were held in dollars, with the bulk of the rest in euros. Holdings of yen were close to zero.
Alexei Ulyukayev, the bank's first deputy chairman, said that, as of next year, yen would be increased as a proportion of the total reserves, while Russia would build stocks of other currencies, including the Australian and Canadian dollars. This could apply some downward pressure to the US dollar.

The central bank's reserve corresponds to that of Russia's $71 billion oil stabilisation fund, created in 2004 to cushion the national budget against any fall in oil prices, the bank said.

At present about 45 per cent of new funds is being invested in dollars, 45 per cent in euros and 10 per cent in sterling.

The precise composition of the total reserve is secret, but in July Mr Ignatyev said that the proportion of US dollars in the total had been cut to 50 per cent and euros increased to 40 per cent - suggesting that Russia had been selling dollars to buy the euro, adding to upward pressure on the latter.

Mr Ulyukayev said that the central bank had bought more than $100 billion (£53.7 billion)from the currency markets this year to prevent too strong an appreciation of Russia's rouble.



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U.S. stocks rise as Dow closes above 12,000

By Chris Sanders
Reuters
Thu Oct 19, 2006

NEW YORK - U.S. stocks rose on Thursday, driving the Dow industrials to end above 12,000 for the first time as strong earnings from companies like Coca-Cola Co. and UPS countered rising oil prices and a report of business weakness in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Coca-Cola, the world's largest soft-drink maker, topped earnings estimates with strong sales in emerging markets, sending its stock up 2.2 percent to $44.91 on the
New York Stock Exchange.

The market received more good news after the closing bell when Web search company Google Inc. said quarterly profit rose 92 percent, sending its shares up 7.7 percent to $459 in electronic trading.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 19.05 points, or 0.16 percent, at 12,011.73. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up 0.94 point, or 0.07 percent, at 1,366.90. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 3.79 points, or 0.16 percent, at 2,340.94.

Package delivery company United Parcel Service Inc. also beat expectations amid strong global demand for packages, boosting its shares 3.9 percent higher to $75.25.

But the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said its business activity index fell in October to a level sharply lower than forecasts, raising concerns about the sustainability of corporate profits. A rise in oil prices fed worries about increased costs for businesses.

Speaking of the Dow's close above 12,000, Eric Thorne, a portfolio manager with the Bryn Mawr Trust Company in Pennsylvania, said, "It's more of a symbolic passage than a meaningful new high.

"It signifies a good strong market, but it's a fairly narrow index, and we would prefer to see the rally broaden out."

The Dow, an average of 30 major stocks, reached an all-time intraday peak of 12,049.51 on Wednesday.

Shares of Altria Group rose 2.3 percent to $80.12 and gave the biggest boost to the Dow on speculation the consumer goods company was closer to announcing a spin-off of the 88 percent of Kraft Foods Inc. which Altria still owns.

But rising oil held down market gains as crude futures rose above $58 a barrel as OPEC looked to trim output for the first time since 2004.

Shares of Apple Computer Inc. added a sparkle to technology front, a day after the maker of the popular iPod digital media player, posted quarterly results that outstripped estimates. Apple shares rose 6 percent to $78.99.

Hewlett-Packard Co. rose 1.4 percent to $39.56 after it recaptured the worldwide lead in personal computer shipments from rival Dell Inc. in the third quarter. Dell shares fell 6.4 percent to $23.12.

Volume was active on the NYSE, where about 1.64 billion shares changed hands, slightly above last year's daily average of 1.61 billion. On the Nasdaq, about 2.02 billion shares were traded, above last year's daily average of 1.80 billion.

Advancers outnumbered decliners on the Big Board by about 5 to 3. On the Nasdaq advancers outpaced decliners by 3 to 2.



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OPEC surprises with deeper oil cut

By Peg Mackey and Tom Ashby
Reuters
October 20, 2006

DOHA - OPEC agreed on Friday to curb its output by 1.2 million barrels per day, its first cut for more than two years, to halt a precipitous fall in prices.

The reduction, amounting to 4.3 percent of OPEC's September production, was deeper than anticipated and the biggest since January 2002. It trims OPEC output to 26.3 million bpd from November 1.
"The credibility of OPEC is at stake," Algerian Energy and Mines Minister Chakib Khelil told Reuters before the meeting that began Thursday and ended in the early hours of Friday.

Some ministers said a further cut of 500,000 bpd could follow when OPEC next meets in Abuja in December, to address high fuel stocks in consumer countries, particularly the United States, and a projected drop in demand for OPEC oil in 2007.

U.S. oil rose 73 cents to $59.23 on the news.

In a statement issued after the meeting, OPEC expressed concern that oil supplies were far outstripping demand.

"The over-supply situation and imbalance in supply/demand fundamentals have destabilized the market," it said.

Khelil said all 10 OPEC members subject to quotas would participate in the cut. Only Iraq, struggling to get its oil industry back on its feet after war and sanctions, was exempt.

"Everybody has a share," Khelil told reporters.

Ministers were aware their failure to speak with one voice in the two weeks leading up to the hastily arranged talks had contributed to oil's slide to $58 a barrel this week, 26 percent off its mid-July peak and near its lowest level this year.

Once in Doha the group that pumps over a third of the world's oil presented a united front.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi broke his public silence to say the world's leading exporter fully supported the plan to cut supplies and he flagged further cuts may lie ahead.

"This is not the end of the road," he told Reuters.

Gary Ross, CEO at PIRA Energy consultancy, said it was clear OPEC meant business.

"OPEC sees itself being challenged by financial speculators and will respond aggressively to make clear to the market its price objectives and willingness to cut volumes to achieve these objectives," Ross said.

DETAILS

Arriving in Doha, ministers already had a pretty clear idea of their individual production cuts. There was broad acceptance that reductions must be made to real oil supplies rather than nominal quotas that have little relation to the barrels pumped.

But members jealously guard their quotas that are bound up with national price and market share.

In the days before the meeting Iran and Venezuela, struggling to meet their official limits, were wary of a supply-based cut that would see them ceding market share to OPEC producers that were pumping far above quota, notably Algeria.

OPEC found a middle ground on Friday.

To sidestep the issue of quotas and market share, it published only a list of individual cutbacks without giving the basis for the calculation or new national limits.

OPEC's biggest member Saudi Arabia, will shoulder around 32 percent of the cut, amounting to 380,000 bpd.

Iran, Kuwait and Venezuela will cut at least 100,000 bpd.

CHALLENGE AHEAD

Analysts said OPEC's next task was to prove to the market it really was curbing supplies. Saudi Arabia said it had already notified its customers of cuts to November exports.

"The group must provide the market with a credible scheme or prices may fall further," ABN AMRO analyst Geoff Pyne said.

Algeria's Khelil said a $50-$60 price range for OPEC's basket of crudes, last valued at $55.27 a barrel, would be acceptable to oil producers and consumers. That would put U.S. crude between $55-$65 -- three times its price in January 2002.

"A price of $60 for U.S. oil is perceived as a level that does not harm world economic growth whereas $70-$80 does, or at least raises enough concern that central bankers start increasing interest rates," said analyst Mike Wittner of Calyon.

OPEC's official ceiling has been at 28 million bpd since July 2005. During that time output has shifted around 500,000 bpd either side of the official limit.



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NY Times Co. 3Q Profit Plunges 39%, Belo Also Down

By E&P Staff and The Associated Press
October 19, 2006

CHICAGO - The New York Times Co. reported Thursday that its third-quarter 2006 profit from continuing operations plunged 39.2% on costs related to its job cuts and a loss on its sale of its 50% stake in the Discovery Times Channel.
Meanwhile, Belo, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, said net income for the quarter fell to $19.2 million, or 19 cents per share, compared to $22.1 million, or 20 cents per share, during the same period last year.

At the New York Times Co., 3Q operating profit was down 48% from the same period in 2005 to $20.5 million on total revenues that slipped 2.4% to $739.6 million.

Reflecting a continuing tough advertising environment, total ad revenue was off 4.2% to 465,476.

The Times Co. said it earned $14 million, or 10 cents per share, compared with $23.1 milion, or 16 cents per share, in the third quarter of 2005.

Charges related to the staff reduction and the cable TV investment loss each reduced per-share price by 3 cents.

"Our third-quarter results reflect the continued weakness in the print advertising marketplace," Times Co. President and CEO Janet L. Robinson said in a statement. "We are, however, strongly encouraged by the discipline our teams have shown in holding the line on operating costs, which were virtually flat with the third quarter of last year. The leadership we are showing in transitioning from our print-centric distribution model to become a multi-platform content provider continues to pay dividends through the robust growth in our Internet-related revenues, which contributed more than 8% of the company's revenues in the quarter and are on track to exceed $250 million by year end."

Times Co. noted that for this reporting period its broadcast media group are now classified as discontinued operations. In September, the company announced plans to sell the group.

Newsprint expense decreased 2.2% in the third quarter, with 11.1% of the decrease attributable to lower consumption, partially offset by an 8.9% price increase.

News Media Group revenues decreased 3.0% to $721.3 million, the company said.

Advertising revenues decreased 5.1%, due to weakness in print advertising at The New York Times Media Group and the New England Media Group, partially offset by higher online advertising revenues across the News Media Group, the company said.

Circulation revenues were down 1.3%, which the company attributed mainly to weakness at the New England Media Group.

Operating profit for the online business increased to $6.4 million from $3.8 million. All told, Internet-related businesses generated $62.8 million in revenue, up from $50.5 million in the year-ago period.

The Times said its previously announced plans to consolidate New York area printing at its College Point, N.Y., plan and to sublease its Edison, N.J. plan, is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2008.

The Times said it expects a return of "at least 15%" on its $135 million investment in the consolidation, with a payback period of five and a half years. It said it currently estimates it will record total costs to close the Edison plan to be in the range of $104 to $128 million.

TimesSelect, the fee-based product on NYTimes.com, currently has 551,000 subscribers, the Times Co. said, with about 65% receiving TimesSelect as part their home-delivery subscriptions, and 35% receiving it from online-only subscriptions. Since its launch in September 2005, TimesSelect has generated more than $8.5 million in revenues, the company said.

Meanwhile, newspaper and television station owner Belo Corp. said Thursday third-quarter profit dropped 13% weighed down by charges, as revenue edged up slightly amid weak results from the company's newspaper group.

Belo, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, said net income for the quarter fell to $19.2 million, or 19 cents per share, compared to $22.1 million, or 20 cents per share, during the same period last year.

Results for the latest quarter were hurt by $5.4 million, or 3 cents per share, in severance charges for a voluntary severance program at the Dallas Morning News. They were also impacted by $10 million, or 6 cents per share, in transition costs associated with its technology initiatives and $2.9 million, or 2 cents per share, in stock-based compensation costs.

Last year's results included a $3.5 million, or 2 cents per share, credit to network compensation and an impact of 4 cents per share from lost revenues and incremental expenses associated with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial were looking for third-quarter earnings of 18 cents per share.

Revenue gained 0.8 percent to $376.4 million from $373.4 million, missing analysts' estimates of $386.3 million. Television group revenue rose 6.9 percent, while newspaper group revenue fell 4.2 percent



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Venezuela and China - Towards a Multi-Polar World

Monday, Oct 16, 2006
Michael Locker and Dave Hancock

Venezuela is currently attempting to break the iron grip of the United States and the multinational corporations that continue to play a dominant role in its economy. The long term goal is to create an alternative international system that promotes social development over profit promotes productive sovereignty and bilateral cooperation over the short sighted demands of international finance. In order to shift the global balance of power and fuel the economic development of Venezuela in the interests of its own people, Chavez seeks to forge strong international ties with other developing nations to secure the necessary capital, technology and expertise traditionally provided by the multinational corporations and institutions he is looking to neutralize. Venezuela's growing strategic relationship with China is but one example of this emerging trend.
In terms of energy, China will invest approximately $2 billion in Venezuela's oil industry through the creation of a Chinese-Venezuelan joint venture, according to Bloomberg News. This new entity will exploit the untapped oil reserves in the Zumano region and the Orinoco oil belt. Zumano has reserves of about 400 million barrels of light oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. PDVSA, the state-owned Venezuelan oil company, will hold a majority stake in this joint venture. The two countries will also form a joint venture to explore and certify a portion of Venezuela's untapped heavy oil reserves, which Chavez
says may contain an additional 235 billion barrels of oil.

The explicit goal of this venture is to increase Chinese imports of Venezuelan oil to 500,000 barrels in five years, up from the 150,000 barrels a day currently imported. This relationship is beneficial for China as it searches for a stable and plentiful source of oil to meet its skyrocketing domestic needs. The deal is also in Venezuela's best interest as it looks to diversify its oil exports, shifting away from its dependence on the US market which currently buys approximately 3/4 of its daily exports of 2 million barrels.

Most importantly, this new joint venture will allow Venezuela to make sorely needed investments in its oil industry. This necessary but extremely expensive investment in technology, infrastructure and the exploration of new, untapped, heavy oil fields will be conducted without relying on the expertise and financial support of private oil companies which are increasingly loath to make long term investments in the context of growing state intervention. Furthermore, the Chinese are in a perfect position to help Venezuela explore its difficult, untapped reserves due to their experience in 'enhanced oil recovery from older, life-long fields,' according to Gavin Thompson of energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

The bilateral agreements signed by the Chinese and the Venezuelan governments have far reaching implications that go beyond the oil industry. In addition to the $2 billion set aside for investment in energy the Chinese government has pledged some $9 billion for the construction of Venezuela's national rail system, an infrastructure plan intricately linked to the Venezuelan government's ambitious goals of import substitution and rapid domestic industrial development.

The high grade rails necessary for the execution of this plan will be strategically produced at a nascent state owned industrial facility called the City of Steel. Located in Estado de Bolivar, the iron and steel capital of Venezuela, the City of Steel will contain a number of strategic industrial facilities that will one day comprise the "nucleus" of the "transformative sector" of the economy, according to the government.

Included in the City of Steel will be a state-of-the-art iron ore concentration plant which will process iron ore for use in steel production. Roughly $350 million has been set aside for this plant whose design and construction are presently being overseen by Spanish and Canadian firms. The entire plant will be completed in late 2007, but the first phase is on pace to be finished by November 1, 2006 -- prior to the upcoming presidential election. In addition to the iron ore concentration plant, the government is planning to build a steel mill, a seamless tube plant, and the rail fabrication plant. The steel mill will be dedicated to substituting imports and will not compete with domestic producers. The seamless tube plant will supply the natural gas and oil industry with the inputs necessary for its expansion plans which are intricately tied to the aforementioned Venezuelan-Chinese joint venture. The rail fabrication plant will be geared towards the needs of the planned national rail system, which, as was previously mentioned, is being funded in part with $9 billion in direct Chinese government investment. In addition to merely funding the project, the Chinese are in a strong position to contribute their own technical expertise and practical experience in the development of extensive rail networks.

Organized as Social Production Enterprises, each of these businesses will be subject to worker co-management and less-hierarchical modes of internal organization. The government estimates that the City of Steel will generate some 2,770 direct jobs and another 8,310 indirect jobs and will end up costing more than $2 billion.

These state-owned enterprises in the City of Steel will form an essential part of the Venezuelan government's policy of "endogenous development," which seeks to achieve "productive sovereignty" through the promotion of import substitution and the development of domestic industry. According to Victor Alvarez, former Venezuelan Minister of Basic Industries and Mines, "the objective is that we will not import even a gram of aluminum or a kilogram of wood," adding, "In 2012... we should be processing 100 percent of our raw materials, our basic products in this country."

In addition to the previously discussed agreements, China and Venezuela are in talks to create a permanent mechanism for further bilateral development assistance in the form of a 'strategic fund of bilateral cooperation.' This fund would be designed to circumvent the influence of American and European financial institutions and would resemble the $2 billion joint development fund recently created by Iran and Venezuela.

Contrary to the claims of his critics, Chavez's vision of "endogenous development" is not one of anti-globalization or international isolation. Instead, as demonstrated by its developing relationship with China and other countries, the Venezuelan model rejects the traditional role of western finance capital and multinational corporate power in order to promote a new international order founded on the principals of bilateral cooperation, mutual assistance, productive sovereignty and social development.

Michael Locker is President of Locker Associates Inc., an economic consulting firm based in New York City.

Dave Hancock is a student at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.



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Rise in bad debts pushes Egg into second-half loss

By James Daley
The Independent
20 October 2006

Prudential, the UK's second largest life insurer, conceded yesterday that its internet banking arm, Egg, is to run up yet another hefty loss in the second half of the year, as rising bad debt levels continue to get the better of the business.

Publishing its third-quarter results yesterday, the group said it expected Egg to run up a similar level of losses in the second half to the £39m operating loss which it chalked up in the first six months of the year.

The group chief executive, Mark Tucker, said rising levels of bad debts, particularly on Egg's personal loan book, was the main reason for the loss, claiming that the bank had seen a 40 per cent rise in the number of its customers using debt management companies over the past quarter. These organisations help customers write off some of their debts by negotiating with all their creditors.
Mr Tucker was unable to reassure investors that Prudential would put Egg back into profit next year.

Egg has become an embarrassment for Prudential over the past year. After taking over as chief executive in 2005, Mr Tucker decided to buy the remaining 21 per cent stake in the internet bank that the company did not already own. In the months since the deal was completed, the bank's fortunes have taken a turn for the worse.

The group's overall revenues for the nine months to the end of September were in line with expectations, up 6 per cent on the same period last year. However, the UK business saw revenues fall 7 per cent as the group shifted its focus to only writing profitable business.

Sales of bulk-purchase annuities, which have accounted for a large proportion of the UK sales growth over the past few years, fell during the quarter. Mr Tucker said this has been due mainly to an increase in competition in the markets, adding that Pru was only prepared to take on new business if it met its capital return targets.

However, the group gained market share in both the US and Asia, where its sales were up 14 and 22 per cent respectively.

Shares in the company fell more than 2 per cent in early trading, before recovering to close up 2.5 per cent at 645.5p, giving the company a market value of £15.6bn.



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Cafe-owners in uproar over 35-hour week ruling

AFP
Oct 19, 2006

PARIS - A French court ruling that the 35-hour working week must apply in hotels, bars and restaurants triggered uproar in the hospitality industry Thursday, amid dire warnings that it will impoverish staff and jeopardise many struggling businesses.

On Thursday the country's highest administrative court - the state council - decided that a 2004 deal under which the 850,000 employees in hotels, bars and restaurants can work 39 hours a week instead of 35 contravenes the key reform of the last Socialist Party (PS) government.
The decision left an estimated 200,000 businesses in legal limbo, uncertain over the costs of implementing the measure, as staff expressed fears that they will see their already low-level incomes shrink still further.

For many cafe-owners and restaurateurs, the ruling was a third blow - coming on top of President Jacques Chirac's failure to win from the European Union a cut to 5.5 percent of valued added tax, as well as an upcoming ban on smoking in public places.

"Have they got it in for us, or what? We feel like we're the outcasts of the state. There are going to be heavy, heavy repercussions - insurmountable ones," said Jean Pournin who employs four people at the Restaurant d'Angleterre in the Mediterranean port of Nice.

Under the 2004 decree hotels, restaurant and bars enjoyed a dispensation from the 35-hour week on the grounds that the industry needs a flexible labour structure. Staff were not paid at overtime rates for hours after the 35th, but instead had an extra week of holiday that could be exchanged for more pay.

But responding to an appeal from the CFDT union, the state council said the arrangement is illegal because there is no reason in law to regard the catering trade as an exception.

It means that employers will be obliged to pay overtime rates for supplementary hours worked - at an increase of 25 percent for establishments with more than 20 staff and 10 percent for the rest. On the other hand the extra week of holiday disappears.

In addition, as the ruling is retrospective staff could be entitled to nearly two years of back payments.

Opponents of the ruling - who include the centre-right government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as well as employers and several trade unions - said that the worst affected could be low-paid bar staff, who could see their income actually fall.

Owners warned that the change would make it even harder to attract workers to an industry that is already critically short of staff. It would also mean shortened rosters with the possible loss of opening hours.

"This is a unique situation because for the first time ever a union has actually acted to bring down the buying power of its members, especially those in small establishments who will see their pay cheques get smaller," said Andre Daguin, who heads the Union of Hospitality Trades (UMIH).

Small Businesses Minister Renaud Dutreil told Le Monde newspaper that "the state council's decision makes everyone the loser", while an alliance of unions including the powerful Workers' Force (FO) said "the ruling is catastrophic for everyone."

However supporters said that if employers "play the game" and strictly apply the 35 hour week, then new jobs will be created.

With just six months till France's presidential elections, the row reawakened divisions over the 35 hour week - introduced by the Socialist Party in 2000 - which the right-wing hopeful, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, says has damaged the work ethic and driven down salaries.

The opposition PS has pledged to extend it, despite some misgivings from its frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Segolene Royal.

Villepin called Thursday for immediate negotiations to find a new deal in the sector to take account of the ruling.



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Big Mama Ain't Happy


Scientists: Ozone hole size sets record

AP
Thu Oct 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - This year's Antarctic ozone hole is the biggest ever, government scientists said Thursday. The so-called hole is a region where there is severe depletion of the layer of ozone - a form of oxygen - in the upper atmosphere that protects life on Earth by blocking the sun's ultraviolet rays.
Scientists say human-produced gases such as bromine and chlorine damage the layer, causing the hole. That's why many compounds such as spray-can propellants have been banned in recent years.

"From Sept. 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles," said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. That's larger than the area of North America.

In addition, satellite measurements observed a low reading of 85 Dobson units of ozone on Oct. 8. That's down from a thickness of 300 Dobson units in July.

The ozone hole is considered to be the area with total column ozone below 220 Dobson Units. A reading of 100 Dobson Units means that if all the ozone in the air above a point were brought down to sea-level pressure and cooled to freezing it would form a layer 1 centimeter thick. A reading of 250 Dobson Units translates to a layer about an inch thick.

In a critical layer of air between eight and 13 miles above the surface, the measurement was only 1.2 Dobson unit, down from 125 in July.

"These numbers mean the ozone is virtually gone in this layer of the atmosphere," said David Hofmann, director of the Global Monitoring Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory. "The depleted layer has an unusual vertical extent this year, so it appears that the 2006 ozone hole will go down as a record-setter."

The size and thickness of the ozone hole varies from year to year, becoming larger when temperatures are lower.

Because of international agreements banning ozone-depleting substances, researchers calculated that these chemicals peaked in Antarctica in 2001 and have been declining. However, many of them have extremely long lifetimes once released into the air.

While there are year-to-year variations, scientists expect a slow recovery of the ozone layer by the year 2065, anticipating declines in the use of damaging chemicals.



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U.N. says number of ocean "dead zones" rising fast

By Daniel Wallis
Reuters
Thu Oct 19, 2006

NAIROBI - The number of "dead zones" in the world's oceans may have increased by a third in just two years, threatening fish stocks and the people who depend on them, the U.N. Environment Program said on Thursday.

Fertilizers, sewage, fossil fuel burning and other pollutants have led to a doubling in the number of oxygen-deficient coastal areas every decade since the 1960s.
Now experts estimate there are 200 so-called ocean dead zones, compared with 150 two years ago.

"Some successes are being scored but in other areas -- like sewage, nutrients from fertilizer run off, animal wastes and atmospheric pollution; sediment mobilization and marine litter -- the problems are intensifying," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

The first "dead zones" -- where pollution-fed algae remove oxygen from the water -- were found in northern latitudes like the Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast and the Scandinavian fjords.

Today, the best known is in the Gulf of Mexico, where fertilizers and other algae-multiplying nutrients are dumped by the Mississippi River.

Others have been appearing off South America, Ghana, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Britain.

The UNEP said in a statement that experts warn "these areas are fast becoming major threats to fish stocks and thus to the people who depend upon fisheries for food and livelihoods."

The full list is expected to be published early next year, but the preliminary findings were released on Thursday at an international marine pollution conference in Beijing, China, which gathered delegates from more than 100 nations.

The meeting also heard some good news from scientists studying the recovery rates of coral reefs damaged by bleaching in the late 1990s by high sea temperatures.

Coral reefs get bleached when warm water forces out tiny algae that live in the coral, providing nutrients and giving reefs their vivid colors. Without the algae, corals whiten and eventually die.

"The new studies indicate healthy ecosystems exposed to minimal contamination are likely to recover and survive better than those stressed by pollution, dredging and other human-made impacts," Steiner said.

UNEP said the overall findings were given even more urgency by new modeling that shows up to 90 percent of the world's tropical coasts may be developed by 2030.

"Climate change, and the need to build resilience into habitats and ecosystems so they can cope with the anticipated increase in temperatures likely to come, now represents a further urgent reason to act," Steiner added

Thursday's meeting came just over two weeks before the start of global warming talks under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change due to begin in Nairobi, Kenya on November 6.



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NASA repeats: Greenland ice sheet shrinking fast

Reuters
Thu Oct 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said in a statement.

The high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons (14 cubic miles) annually from excess snowfall, they said.

This is a change from the 1990s, when ice gains approximately equaled losses, said Scott Luthcke of NASA's Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory outside Washington.
"That situation has now changed significantly, with an annual net loss of ice equal to nearly six years of average water flow from the Colorado River," Luthcke said.

Luthcke and his team reported their findings in Science Express, the advance edition of the journal Science.

The ice mass loss in this study is less than half that reported in other recent research, NASA said in a statement, but it still shows that Greenland is losing 20 percent more mass than it gets in new snowfall each year.

The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early indicator of the consequences of global warming, so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.

"This is a very large change in a very short time," said Jay Zwally, a co-author of the study. "In the 1990s, the ice sheet was growing inland and shrinking significantly at the edges, which is what climate models predicted as a result of global warming.

"Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning to dominate the inland growth, and we are only in the early stages of the climate warming predicted for this century," Zwally said.



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Peru Is Shaken by Magnitude 6.5 Offshore Earthquake (Update1)

By Alex Morales and Matthew Craze
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg)

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Peru was hit by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Latin American nation and shook buildings in its capital, Lima.

The temblor struck shortly before 5:50 a.m. local time, about 48 kilometers (30 miles) west-northwest of Chincha Alta, western Peru, and 156 km south-southeast of Lima, the U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors global seismological events, said in a preliminary report on its Web site.
Apartments, commercial towers and hotels, including the Marriott hotel, in Lima's Miraflores district, which is perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, shook during the earthquake. No damage has been reported.

There is no threat of a Pacific-wide tsunami as a result of the earthquake, though temblors of its magnitude sometimes cause destructive tsunamis along coasts within 100 km of the epicenter, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in an e- mailed bulletin.

The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said in an e-mailed statement that the quake wasn't sufficient to produce a tsunami damaging to the Pacific coasts of Canada and the U.S.

Earthquakes of magnitudes 6 to 6.9 are defined as "strong'' by the USGS. About 120 quakes of that size strike worldwide annually, according to the monitoring group.



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Insurers put Wilma damage at $3 billion

AP
Thu Oct 19, 2006

MEXICO CITY - Hurricane Wilma caused $3 billion in damage, the largest insured losses in Mexican history, the director of the Mexican Insurance Association said Thursday.
About $1.8 billion of the losses were insured damage, Recaredo Arias told a news conference.

Two days before Wilma's first anniversary, Arias said the industry had paid 94 percent of those claims to hotels, restaurants, banks, hospitals, schools and homeowners.

Hurricane Wilma slammed into Cancun on October 21, 2005, filling hotel lobbies with shattered metal, marble, glass and muck, and blowing away so much sand that hotel beaches were reduced to thin strips.



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Setting the Stage


N.Korea's Kim says no further nuclear tests: report

By Sue Pleming and Chris Buckley
Reuters
October 20, 2006

BEIJING - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told a visiting Chinese envoy that Pyongyang planned to conduct no further nuclear tests, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a diplomatic source in China as saying on Friday.
Japan's Foreign Ministry said it could not confirm or deny the report, which came as U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was in Beijing to rally support for U.N. sanctions against North Korea, passed after it tested a nuclear device on October 9.

But it reinforced the optimism of the envoy over the prospects of bringing Pyongyang back into line since the nuclear test, which brought worldwide condemnation and economic and weapons sanctions.

"I understand he expressed clearly there was no plan to conduct nuclear tests," Yonhap quoted the source as saying.

China, a traditional ally of North Korea, is seen as having the greatest potential leverage over its reclusive neighbor.

President Hu Jintao sent a team of diplomats led by State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan to Pyongyang earlier this week as speculation mounted that communist North Korea might be about to detonate a second nuclear device.

"Fortunately, my visit this time has not been in vain," Tang said at the opening of his meeting with Rice in Beijing.

Rice, who is making a crisis trip to east Asia, said Tang had sent a "strong message" to the North Koreans, and made clear to them that Beijing would fully implement the U.N. sanctions.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said Tang and the North Koreans also discussed how to kick-start stalled talks on Pyongyang's nuclear programs.

"At least it increased mutual understanding. Everyone discussed how to restart progress in the six-party talks as quickly as possible," Li told reporters.

The talks, which bring together the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China, stalled last November after Washington imposed restrictions on Pyongyang's external financing.

China's Xinhua news agency quoted Tang as saying the United States should take a more flexible attitude when dealing with North Korea, but Rice said the financial restrictions would remain.

"The financial measures are a legal process which has to do with counterfeiting money. The (U.S.) president has made very clear at every turn that he is going to defend the U.S. currency," she said.

"SCRUPULOUS"

At a joint briefing after talks with Rice, Li appealed for calm and a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

Rice told the briefing that North Korea's nuclear test was "a serious provocation" that posed a threat to peace and security, particularly in east Asia.

"We talked about the importance of the full implementation of (U.N. resolution) 1718 so we can make certain there is not a transit and trade in illegal materials, dangerous illegal materials, concerning the nuclear program of the DPRK," she said referring to North Korea by its official acronym.

Rice said China made clear that it would be "scrupulous" about inspections on the land border with North Korea, despite fears in Beijing about any action that could cause its neighbor to collapse, bringing instability to its borders.

"You will see cooperation on cargo, particularly if there is suspicious cargo," said Rice when asked what the Chinese were prepared to do.

But Premier Wen Jiabao also reiterated Beijing's view that negotiations were preferable to strong-arm tactics.

"It's in the interest of all parties to resolve the Korean nuclear issue through diplomacy and dialogue. Apart from that, I can see no other choice," he said.



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China appeals for calm in Korean nuclear crisis

Last Updated: Friday, October 20, 2006 | 5:23 AM ET
CBC News

China appealed for "cool-headedness" in the North Korean nuclear crisis Friday, saying a Chinese envoy discussed resuming disarmament talks during a visit to Pyongyang.

"We hope all relevant parties will maintain cool-headedness, adopt a prudent and a responsible approach, and adhere to peaceful dialogue," Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said following a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Beijing.
Rice is on a tour of the region to co-ordinate strategy on North Korea, which launched a nuclear test on Oct. 9.

In response, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose sanctions on the reclusive Communist state, a move North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il said amounted to a declaration of war.

Rice said she and her Chinese counterpart discussed "the importance of leaving open a path to negotiation," through the six-way arms talks. Pyongyang has boycotted the talks since last year, when the U.S. imposed financial sanctions against a number of North Korean companies.

Rice's conciliatory tone appeared to be aimed at keeping Beijing's co-operation, which is key to enforcing the sanctions. The U.S.-backed sanctions were watered down partly at China's request, but China's vote in favour of punishment still represents a shift for Beijing.

Li assured Rice that China would meet its obligations, but avoided the word sanctions.

"China has an excellent track record in playing a constructive role in the international community and in honouring all of our commitments," he said.

China's four major state-owned banks, as well as British-owned HSBC Corp., have cut financial transfers to the North, said Chinese bank employees.

Talks in return for sanctions

The meeting comes the same day a South Korean newspaper reported that Kim Jong-Il told a Chinese presidential envoy he would return to nuclear talks if Washington drops the financial sanctions.

Li told reporters Friday that the meeting between Chinese State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan and North Korean officials "increased mutual understanding.

"Everyone discussed how to restart progress in the six-party talks as quickly as possible," he said.

Tang was sent to Pyongyang to personally deliver a message to the North Korean president. He told Rice his visit "has not been in vain," before reporters were ushered from the room.

No further details were immediately available about Tang's trip.



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BMD Rumblings from Russia

by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Oct 19, 2006

Washington - As America's European allies become more enthusiastic about ballistic missile defense, a Russian general has issued an ominous warning. In a May 25 column in BMD Focus, we warned that the Russian reaction to the embrace of ballistic missile defense by NATO member nations in Europe, especially former Soviet satellites during the Cold War, "could raise tensions in Europe to a level they have not reached since the last great showdown in the Cold War a quarter of a century ago."
An article published in the Moscow newspaper Izvestiya on Tuesday, and written by a senior Russian general, adds weight to this concern.

According to a report of the article carried by Mosnews Wednesday, Yevgeny Buzhinsky, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's international military cooperation department, wrote that Russia would interpret the deployment of U.S. anti-ballistic missile units "near the Russian borders" as "a real threat to our deterrent forces," the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces.

Russian leaders would "view the planned deployment of U.S. missile defense components in Eastern and Central Europe as a security threat and take retaliatory measures," Buzhinsky wrote.

"We would view that as an unfriendly gesture on behalf of the United States, some eastern European nations and NATO as a whole," he wrote. "Such actions would require taking adequate retaliatory measures of military and political character."

Ironically, Buzhinsky's article appeared only three days after the Russian Defense Ministry announced Saturday that Russia would participate in a joint missile defense exercise in the second half of October with NATO.

According to a report carried Saturday by China's official Xinhua news agency, the exercise was scheduled to start on Monday, Oct. 16 and continue for nine days until Oct. 25.

The exercise was intended to boost "joint planning and coordination procedures for Russia and NATO air defense and anti-missile command structures," the ministry was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying. It was scheduled to take place at the Fourth Central Research Institute.

The current exercise is the third of its kind. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, they "have made it possible to practice planning, organizing and conducting concerted and coordinated combat actions to respond to non-strategic ballistic missile attacks in designated areas of responsibility," according to the Xinhua report.

The exercises are clearly intended to boost transparency and maintain trust between NATO and Russia. But Gen. Buzhinsky's article sends another, more alarming message: Russian policymakers are becoming increasingly distrustful of the United States, and they appear increasingly willing to contemplate a major offensive nuclear arms build up of their own to counter the growing deployment of U.S.-built and operated BMD forces in Central Europe.

Thanks to continued very high global oil and gas prices, the Russian government has enjoyed soaring revenues and, as we have noted in BMD Focus and our sister BMD Watch columns, it has been using some of this wealth to upgrade its Strategic Rocket Forces on a scale not seen in more than 20 years.

Also, Gen. Buzhinsky's article appeared almost a month after Marshall S. Billingslea, NATO's assistant secretary-general for defense investment, announced on Sept. 18 that the 26-nation alliance had approved the construction of a $90 million BMD command and control system over the next six years, as well as an integrated test bed for the security of all its member countries.

As we noted in these columns on Sept. 21, "The sum of $90 million, or 75 million euros, is peanuts in the multi-billion dollar world of BMD acquisition and development. But the event was nonetheless a highly significant one. It followed a series of NATO feasibility studies that reported to alliance headquarters in Brussels that a BMD system to defend the alliance's European members was both desirable and feasible."

"The Active Layered Theater Ballistic Missile Defense program will put in place an inter-operable and integrated command/control center that provides individual member country's missile defense assets to be used for the common protection of NATO and her territory," the Italian AKI news agency reported at the time.

Gen. Buzhinsky's blunt warnings in his article should be seen as an initial Russian response to the NATO announcement.

As we noted in our May 25 BMD Focus column, "The development of Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs has prompted at least two major European nations to sign on more enthusiastically than ever before to the U.S. BMD program."

The Bush administration hopes to deploy at least 10 ground-based anti-ballistic missile interceptors at a base in Eastern Europe by 2010 to defend European nations from an attack by a so-called "rogue nation."

The enthusiasm of European nations, especially Poland and the Czech Republic, for BMD has soared over the past six weeks, since the successful test of a Ground-Based Midcourse Interceptor launched from Alaska in destroying a target rocket fired from California on Sept. 1.

Gen. Buzhinksy's article should be seen as an initial Russian response to that development too. But it was far from the first warning of its kind. Back in May, four star Army Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the Russian chief of staff, warned that Russia could react in far-reaching and damaging ways against Poland if it agreed to deploy U.S. BMD systems on its territory.

"Go ahead and build that shield. You have to think, though, what will fall on your heads afterwards," Baluyevsky said. And he pointedly added, "It is understandable that countries that are part of such a shield increase their risk."

Sir Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion teaches that every action causes an equal and opposite reaction. The zeal and success with which the Bush administration is pushing BMD deployment in Europe is setting off a Russian reaction to it that may prove to be a lot more than "equal."



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Security Council's final seat remains undecided

www.chinaview.cn
2006-10-20 08:09:42

UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations General Assembly remained deadlocked Thursday after a third day of voting to choose a nonpermanent member of the Security Council designated to Latin American and Caribbean states.

After 13 rounds of voting Thursday, which takes the total number of rounds so far to 35, neither Guatemala nor Venezuela had yet obtained a two-thirds majority. Balloting is scheduled to resume next Wednesday.
Guatemala and Venezuela are contending to serve as a nonpermanent Council member for a two-year term starting Jan. 1 2007, replacing Argentina. It is the only seat not yet determined.

In the 35th round Thursday, when 123 votes would have been enough to secure victory, Guatemala obtained 103 votes and Venezuela received 81. There were seven abstentions. Guatemala has led in every round so far, with the exception of the sixth round on Monday, when the two countries were tied.

Balloting will continue until a State from the region achieves the required majority. There is no limit to the number of rounds of voting and in 1979-80 there were a record 155 ballots before Mexico was chosen from the Latin American and Caribbean Group to serve a two-year term.

On Monday Assembly members, following an agreed geographic allocation, elected Belgium, Indonesia, Italy and South Africa to serve as nonpermanent members starting Jan. 1 next year. They will replace Denmark, Greece, Japan and Tanzania when their terms end on Dec. 31.

The Council's five other nonpermanent members, whose terms end on Dec. 31, 2007, are Congo, Ghana, Peru, Qatar and Slovakia.



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Iraq: American Colony


Iraqi government hiding true casualty figures

AFP
October 20, 2006

PARIS - The Iraqi government has told medical authorities not to reveal to the United Nations the true extent of civilian casualties in the country's conflict, a French newspaper has said.

Le Monde quoted a telegram Friday sent by the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, to headquarters in New York, in which he said: "This development risks damaging the capacity of the UN's Assistance Mission to report the number of civilians killed or injured."
Since July 2005 the UN has used data provided by Baghdad's Forensic Institute and the Iraqi health ministry to form an estimate. The estimate "was certainly imperfect but an indicator nonetheless of the growing number of civilian victims", the telegram said.

The latest report said that 3,590 civilians died a violent death in July and 3,009 in August, figures which it said were "unprecedented".

But the telegram quoted by Le Monde said that on September 21, one day after publication of the report, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wrote to the health ministry with instructions not to disclose more figures.

In an investigation published in British medical weekly The Lancet earlier this month, US and Iraq specialists estimated that more than 600,000 civilians died a violent death between March 2003 and July 2006.

US President George W. Bush questioned the investigation's findings.

Comment:
"US President George W. Bush questioned the investigation's findings."
Of course he did. And now it has been "revealed" that the "government" in occupied Iraq was responsible for hiding civilian casualty numbers - and only two weeks before the big elections in the US! How lucky for Bush. Then again, given Bush and Rove's insane confidence going into said elections, we reckon that luck isn't going to be necessary for Republican victories...


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White House rejects proposal to partition Iraq

AP
Oct. 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - Awaiting the recommendations of a commission exploring U.S. options in Iraq, the White House on Wednesday emphatically ruled out some proposals to end the long and unpopular war.

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said a suggestion to divide Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions, each with high degrees of autonomy, was a "nonstarter." Similarly, he said a phased withdrawal of American troops - perhaps by 5 percent every two months - also was a "nonstarter."
"You withdraw when you win," Snow said. "Phased withdrawal is a way of saying, 'Regardless of what the conditions are on the ground, we're going to get out of Dodge.' "
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The notions of partitioning Iraq and withdrawing troops have been floated recently as a blue-ribbon commission headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III searches for a bipartisan approach. Baker has said there are alternatives other than "stay the course and cut and run."

Seeking cover?

Among other ideas, the panel is considering whether to set a timetable for withdrawal and whether to solicit help from Iran and Syria to stop the fighting, according to Leon Panetta, a member of the advisory group and one-time chief of staff for former President Clinton. Panetta says no decisions have been made.

The commission's work has been portrayed by some as a way of providing political cover for Bush to change course and scale down the U.S. role, which has cost the lives of at least 2,785 members of the U.S. military since the beginning of the war in March 2003. In October alone, more than 70 American troops have been killed, putting the month on course to be the bloodiest for U.S. forces in nearly two years.

Snow said Bush would take the commission's recommendations seriously but that they were simply advisory suggestions. The White House has said Bush would not feel bound by the group's proposals, which are not due to be released until after the November elections.

The Tet comparison

The White House also tried to clarify Bush's remarks Wednesday when he said the surge of violence in Iraq "could be" comparable to the 1968 Tet offensive that prompted Americans to lose support for the Vietnam War.

"The president was making a point that he's made before, which is that terrorists try to exploit pictures and try to use the media as conduits for influencing public opinion in the United States," Snow said.

Acknowledging that the Tet offensive "was successful from a propaganda point of view," Snow said the violence in Iraq would not have the same result.

"The important thing to remember is, the president's determined it's not going to happen with Iraq because you have a president who is determined to win," he said. "And the strategy is a threefold strategy that involves security, economics and political reconciliation, working with the Iraqis. And we'll continue to make adjustments as necessary to pursue victory."

"But the one thing that nobody should have any doubt about is that we're going win," Snow said.

He agreed that the Tet offensive had become shorthand for the point at which the Vietnam War changed course but, again, said there was no parallel with Iraq.

"We do not think that there's been a flipover point," Snow said. "But more importantly, from the standpoint of the government and the standpoint of this administration, we are going to continue pursuing victory aggressively."



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Egypt fears 'all-out civil war' in Iraq

AFP
Thu Oct 19, 2006

CAIRO - Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit has warned of the looming risk of an "all-out civil war" in Iraq, and urged its religious leaders gathered in Mecca to start mending fences.

"It is with the utmost concern that Egypt is witnessing the escalation of sectarian violence in Iraq and assassinations perpetrated on the basis of the ID card," the minister told reporters.
Abul Gheit warned "against an all-out civil war involving all religious communities".

Iraqi Sunni and Shiite religious leaders are gathering in the Saudi holy city of Mecca in a bid to stem the spriralling civil bloodshed gripping their country. Their talks will be held under the aegis of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

Abul Gheit said he hoped the meeting -- which officially opens on Friday -- would "mark a step towards a return to peace and stability."

Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on Wednesday denied his country was in the throes of civil war. "I don't think that what is happening now in Iraq is civil war," he told reporters in Jordan.



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Three more US soldiers killed in Iraq

AFP
Thu Oct 19, 2006

BAGHDAD - Three more US soldiers have been killed fighting in
Iraq, the latest deaths in an ongoing surge in American casualties.
One soldier died Wednesday of wounds received in enemy action in Ramadi, in the insurgency-prone western Anbar province, while another was killed the same day in Baghdad when gunmen attacked his patrol.

Meanwhile, a military policeman was killed when the vehicle he was in was hit by an improvised explosive device near Balad, a violence-wracked town in northern Iraq which is the centre of a major security operation.

Total American fatalities have reached 73 since the beginning of the month, while the number who have died since the start of the war has climbed to 2,779, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.



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For Your Health


SKorean scientists say cancer-killing virus developed

AFP
Thu Oct 19, 2006

SEOUL - South Korean scientists have said they have developed a new genetically altered strain of virus which is highly efficient in targeting and killing cancer cells.

The new therapy developed by the team from Yonsei University uses a genetically-engineered form of the adenovirus, which normally causes colds.
The adenovirus was implanted with a human gene that is related to the production of relaxin, a hormone associated with pregnancy.

When injected into cancerous tumors, the virus quickly multiplies in the cancer cells and kills them, the team said.

The new adenovirus can target only cancer cells and does not harm normal cells, the team said.

Existing viral treatments fail to kill off all the cancerous cells.

"I believe we have found a way to overcome one of the great obstacles to finding a genetically altered viral cure for cancer," Yun Chae-Ok, one of the researchers, told AFP on Thursday.

Following three rounds of injections, more than 90 percent of cancer cells in the brains, liver, lungs and womb of mice disappeared within 60 days, the team said.

Clinical tests will be carried out early next year and last 18 months, Yun said.

The research results were published in the October 18 edition of the prestigious bimonthly Journal of the
National Cancer Institute in the United States.



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One billion people overweight, 300 million obese worldwide

AFP
Oct 19, 2006

For every four adults in the world who are malnourished five more are overweight, 30 percent of them clinically obese, according to the World Health Organization.

The scourge of obesity, bringing in its train a host of health and economic problems that could one day cripple economies, is more prevalent in some countries than others, but still constitutes a global epidemic, says WHO.
A billion people out of the world's six billion population are now considered overweight, compared with 800 million who do not have enough to eat.

Some 2,000 health experts gather in Boston, Massachusetts on Friday for a four-day conference on treatment and prevention of obesity, organized by the North American Society for the Study of Obesity (NAASO).

While accounting for less than five percent of the population in China, Japan and some African nations, the proportion of obesity -- at the other extreme -- exceeds 75 percent in some urban zones of Samoa, and 45 percent among certain demographic groups in the United States, notably among African Americans.

And even within China, more than 20 percent of the people in certain cities are classified as seriously overweight.

The international standard for determining obesity is the body-mass index (BMI), defined as one's weight in kilograms divided by the square of one's height in meters.

A person who is 1.80 meters (5 feet 11 inches) tall and weights 90 kilos (198 pounds) will be considered as overweight because his BMI -- 27.8 -- is above 25kg/m2, and would be classified as obese if weighing 100 kilos (220 pounds), yielding a BMI -- 30.8 -- above 30kg/m2.

In the United States, 30 percent of adults are clinically obese, some 60 million people. In Europe, Britain tops the list with 23 percent, nearly twice the rate in Germany, where 12 percent tip the scales into obesity, according to the OECD. Italy -- the land of pasta -- only counts eight percent of its population as severely overweight.

But even in European countries where obesity is less prevalent, the percentage has increased steadily over time. In France, with a population of just over 60 million, 5.9 million people are obese today, whereas the figure for 10 years ago was only 3.6.

Overall, there are some 200 million adults in the EU -- fully 45 percent of the population -- who are measurably overweight.

Rates of excess weight and obesity have climbed to alarming levels among children too, experts say.

There are about 14 million overweight pre-teen youngsters in the European Union -- at least 3 million of them obese -- with an additional 500,000 crossing the line every year, according to recent study by the International Task Force on Obesity.

In Portugal, more than 30 percent of 9-to-16 year olds are obese, three times more than a decade ago, prompting health minister Antonio Correia de Campos to warn recently that "50 percent of the Portuguese population will be obese in 2050 if nothing is done."

In the United States, the proportion of youth between the age of six and 19 classified as overweight tripled between 1980 and 2002, according to a federal study published earlier this year by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Developing countries are not immune to the problem, experts note. In Thailand, for example, the percentage of five-to-twelve year olds who are obese has climbed from 12.2 to 15.6 in only two years, according to WHO.

In general, obesity rates start to climb towards epidemic levels in developing nations as the sedentary lifestyles and rich diets -- laden with sugar, fats and salt -- common in many Western countries take hold, noted experts and the 10th International Congress on Obesity, held in Sydney in September.

The exploding rates of obesity contribute heavily to increased rates of many chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, hyper-tension, arteriosclerosis, cerebral hemorrhaging, and certain kinds of cancer.

Type-2 diabetes was once a disease that only affected adults, most often advanced in age, but today it has become common even among obese pre-adolescent children, WHO said.

Ninety percent of those afflicted with type-2 diabetes are either overweight or obese.



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Why does eating feel so good? It's all in the head

Reuters
Thu Oct 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - Why does eating feel so good? The secret may lie in the head, not in the stomach, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

Tests on rats show that the appetite hormone ghrelin acts on pleasure receptors in the brain.
The findings may help researchers develop better diet drugs.

"In mice and rats ghrelin triggers the same neurons as delicious food, sexual experience, and many recreational drugs; that is, neurons that provide the sensation of pleasure and the expectation of reward," the researchers write in Friday's issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"These neurons produce dopamine and are located in a region of the brain known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA)," wrote the researchers, headed by Dr. Tamas Horvath of the Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut.

Horvath's team found that ghrelin, itself only discovered in the last decade, acts on a molecular structure on brain cells called the ghrelin receptor growth hormone secretagogue 1 receptor or GHSR for short.

When ghrelin was infused into this area of the rats' brains, they ate as hungrily as they did after being kept hungry overnight, the researchers said.

Ghrelin is produced in the gut and triggers the brain to promote eating.

Several hormones are known to be involved in eating and appetite, and studies have shown that influencing them can affect weight gain in rats and mice. Influencing human eating behavior has proven far more difficult, however.

Horvath said it might be possible to design a drug that interferes with GHSR and thus help people with eating disorders.



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West Australian Fossil Find Rewrites Land Mammal Evolution

SPX
Oct 20, 2006

Melbourne, Australia - A fossil fish discovered in the West Australian Kimberley has been identified as the missing clue in vertebrate evolution, rewriting a century-old theory on how the first land animals evolved.
Monash University PhD students Mr Erich Fitzgerald and Mr Tim Holland were part of the research team, led by Museum Victoria's Head of Science Dr John Long, that made the spectacular discovery by studying a 380 million-year-old fossil fish called Gogonasus, or Gogo fish, named after Gogo Station in Western Australia where it was found.

The fossil skeleton shows the fish's skull had large holes for breathing through the top of the head but importantly also had muscular front fins with a well-formed humerus, ulna and radius - the same bones are found in the human arm.

"This new fossil proves that features of land-living tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) evolved much earlier in their evolutionary history than previously thought," Mr Fitzgerald, a researcher in the School of Geosciences, said. "This means that humans can trace their evolutionary roots, and adaptations for life on land, further back in time, to more than 380 million years ago.

"This little fossil fish, Gogonasus, is therefore the ultimate 'Mother' of all tetrapods."

The research findings are published today in the journal Nature.

"Gogonasus is the new pivotal fossil for understanding the earliest phase in the transition from sea-going fish to land-dwelling tetrapods -- from dinosaurs, to kangaroos, and ultimately, us humans," Mr Fitzgerald said.

"The fossils of Gogonasus raise the possibility that tetrapods originated not in the northern hemisphere, as is widely thought, but in Gondwana, the ancient southern super-continent, and more specifically Australia. But further discoveries of fossils in Australia are needed to confirm this."



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The Final Frontier


Meteor totals German cottage

By Lester Haines
The Register
Friday 20th October 2006

German police today announced that a fire which swept through a cottage near Bonn, in the process injuring a 77-year-old man, was probably caused by a meteor.

According to Reuters, the 10 October incendiary incident in Siegburg gutted the cottage and "badly burned the man's hands and face".
Police spokesman Burkhard Rick said: "We sought assistance from Bochum observatory and they noted that at that particular moment the Earth was near a field of meteoroid splinter and it could be assumed that particles had entered the atmosphere.

"The particles usually don't reach the surface because they disintegrate in the atmosphere. But some can make it to the ground. We believe this was a bolide [meteoric fireball] with a size of no more than 10mm."



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Orionid Meteor Shower To Peak October 20-24

SKY
Oct 20, 2006

Los Angeles, CA - The Orionid meteor shower isn't one of the year's richest, but it's pretty. Every year it produces up to 20 "shooting stars" visible per hour before dawn from about October 20th to 24th, given good sky conditions. This year the Moon is new and therefore absent from the early-morning sky.
The Orionids have an illustrious parentage. Like the Eta Aquarids of May, they are bits of debris shed long ago by Halley's Comet. The two showers are essentially one and the same; Earth intersects a single, broad stream of meteoroids at two places in its orbit on opposite sides of the Sun.

Like the Eta Aquarids, the Orionids tend to be faint and swift -- only the Leonids hit Earth's atmosphere faster -- and they often leave briefly glowing trains. The shower is actually a complex of several subshowers with different maxima spread over several days. The subshowers' radiants (the perspective points from which the meteors would appear to come if you could see them approaching from the far distance) are grouped near Orion's Club.

For observers around 40 degrees north latitude, the radiants rise high in the eastern sky (at least 45 degrees up) by about 2 a.m. local daylight-saving time. So that's when the meteor activity gets good. The first light of dawn begins stealing into the east about four hours later.

Halley's Comet last came through the inner solar system in 1985-86, and its 15-by-8-kilometer (9-by-5-mile) nucleus shed a layer of dirty ice about 6 meters (20 feet) thick on average. This has been happening every 76 years for many millennia. During that time the dirt bits have spread all around Halley's elongated orbit and a fair distance from it sideways, which is why some of the particles now intersect Earth even though the comet's orbit does not.

(The orbits of Halley and Earth are separated by 22 million km, or 15% of the average Earth-Sun distance, at their closest point.) No one knows how long it took the Orionid meteoroids to drift so far off track -- one estimate is 4,000 to 10,000 years -- but it's clear that as shower meteoroids go, the Orionids are old.

They've been seen for a long time too. The first known Orionid shower was recorded by the Chinese in AD 288, when "stars fell like rain." The shower has been well observed ever since astronomers first recognized its radiant in 1864.

To watch the Orionids, bundle up very warmly and bring a lawn chair and sleeping bag; meteor observing is the coldest activity you can do close to home. Find a dark spot with an open view of the sky. The less light pollution the better; a shower like this one that's rich in faint meteors is especially hard hit by artificial skyglow. The direction to watch is wherever your sky is darkest. "Arrange the chair so that any bright lights are behind you out of sight, bundle up, lie back, and watch the stars," says Sky and Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert. "Be patient."



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Strong Leonid Meteor Shower Expected Nov. 18

By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
17 October 2006

If you live in Western Europe or eastern North America, put a big circle on your calendar around Saturday, Nov. 18. If that night is clear, bundle up warmly and head outside because you may be able to catch a glimpse of an intense, albeit brief display of Leonid meteors.
The Leonids are composed of the dusty debris that has been shed by the comet Temple-Tuttle, a small celestial body that orbits the Sun at 33-year intervals. In those years during and then for several years after the comet has swept through the inner solar system, it has had a propensity for producing spectacular meteor displays; meteors falling by the hundreds, if not thousands per hour.

These "shooting stars" all apparently emanate from the constellation of Leo, the Lion. Hence the name "Leonids."

The great years

The comet last passed the Sun and Earth in 1998, and from that year through 2002, the Leonids produced showers in which meteors fell at rates of more than a thousand per hour-displays that astronomers call meteor storms.

Since 2003, however, with Temple-Tuttle having receded back into the far reaches of the solar system, the Leonids have been disappointing, barely producing more than 10 meteors per hour.

It appeared that the chances of any more spectacular Leonid displays were over for many years to come. But that might not be case, if the calculations of several reputable meteor scientists prove to be correct.

Prediction for 2006

Apparently, a rather narrow but dense ribbon of dust was shed by comet Temple-Tuttle when it passed the Sun in 1932. When the Earth interacted with that dusty trail back in 1969, it produced a brief bevy of some 200 to 300 meteors in less than hour.

In 2006, Earth will be nearly twice as far away from the comet as opposed to 1969, but expectations are that as many as 100 to 150 Leonids may streak across the sky in only an hour's time as we interact with that decades-old ribbon of debris again.

The expected time of peak activity is 11:45 p.m. EST on the night of Nov. 18.

Where to watch

For those living in eastern North America, the constellation of Leo will be rising in the eastern sky. Unfortunately, those living across the central and western parts of the United States and Canada will be out of luck, since Leo will not yet have risen and the expected peak of the display will be over when Leo finally comes above the horizon.

Skywatchers in Western Europe will have ringside seats: The peak is due early on Sunday morning, Nov. 19 at 4:45 GMT. Leo will be high in the southeast sky, just before sunrise affording the very best Leonid views.

Meteor watching is easy. Simply find the darkest location you can with a clear view of the eastern horizon. Then go out and look up. Binoculars and telescopes are of no use.



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Was There Water On Mars Long Enough For The Origination Of Life

by Susan Trulove
SPX
Oct 20, 2006

Blacksburg, VA - Based on the lovely green rock, olivine, also known as the gemstone, peridot, a Virginia Tech graduate student has created a mineral lifetime diagram that provides the a clue to when and for how long there might have been water on Mars.
Amanda Albright Olsen of Altoona, Pa., a doctoral student in geosciences at Virginia Tech, will present the research at the Geological Society of America national meeting in Philadelphia on Oct. 22-25. Virginia Tech Geosciences Professor Donald Rimstidt of Christiansburg, Va., is co-author.

Olivine, a silicate mineral rich in magnesium and iron, is found on earth in volcanic rock (basalts). It has also been spotted on Mars - most recently and in significant amounts by NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft (Geology, June 2005). Because life requires liquid water and because olivine dissolves in water, Olsen set out to establish how long it takes olivine to dissolve. The answer could help scientists determine if there was liquid water on Mars long enough for life to develop.

"Our goal is to produce a robust analysis of olivine dissolution that can be used to predict olivine grain lifetimes," Olsen said.

She used published information and laboratory studies to construct a baseline model, and introduced controlling factors, such as pH and temperature. Since environmental factors have often resulted in slower dissolution rates in the field than in the lab, she compared her results with an analysis of olivine in natural environments by Virginia Tech Geoscience Professor Michal Kowalewski and Rimstidt (2003), who determined average mineral grain lifetimes based on radiometric dates.

Olsen and Rimstidt's conclusion is that the Martian olivine could take between slightly less than a million years to as long as many millions of years to dissolve in water. She cautions that pH is a highly controlling factor and a more precise estimate awaits information on the chemical conditions on the Mars surface.

"Amanda's research will be a tool to help others pin it down," Rimstidt said.

"Regardless of what physiochemical conditions that we postulate for early Martian history, we can now propose a scenario and ask, 'Is it reasonable to expect that life could have originated in this time frame?'" Olsen said.



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Scientists Create Another Cloak of Invisibility

Michael Hoffman
October 19, 2006

A team of US and British scientists have successfully tested a device that is able to cloak a small copper cylinder from microwaves during testing. The cloak of invisibility only works in two dimensions and only on microwaves. The research conducted by Professor Sir John Pendry of Imperial College of London while working at Duke University involved deflecting the microwaves around the copper cylinder while being able to restore them once they reached the other side of the object. The little amount of distortion made it look like there was nothing there at all. The research team also used microwaves to try and detect the cloaked copper cylinder with little success.
Pendry's team published a theory around five months ago that stated his team would be able to design a device that would be able to cloak items to make them appear to be invisible. Even with apparent success, the team still has much work to do. They will now begin to try to develop a three-dimensional cloak.

Even though the research is greatly improving, scientists are quick to note that consumers shouldn't get their hopes up of possibly being able to use the technology in their own homes any time soon. The official press release even mentions the technical difficulties and unlikelihood of an object being able to vanish before a person's eyes like in the Harry Potter books.

This is not the same as the optical camoflague technique demonstrated by Russian scientists earlier this year. In fact, the technique from several months ago relies on cameras to "relay" the image behind the wearer. While novel, the technology does not really represent a breakthrough in the same way Pendry's team has demonstrated.



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