- Signs of the Times for Fri, 27 Oct 2006 -

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For centuries in Britain, each sentence of death was accompanied by a strange ritual. Before handing down the verdict, the judge would first take a piece of black silk cloth and put it on his head. With this rather bizarre and ancient drapery covering his powdered wig - itself a relic, a cultural fossil carried into modern times - he would then render the prisoner into the hangman's care.

In such a guise, the black cloth once represented the full, dread measure of state power. Today, however, a cloth of similar size, shape and color - worn across the faces of a small number of some of the most vulnerable members of British society - has become a target of that same dread power, after Britain's high and mighty unleashed a sudden, thunderous sneak attack on the nation's Muslim minority, centering the campaign around the tabloid-ready symbol of the veil.

But although the carefully orchestrated furor over this seldom-seen scrap of material has been so ludicrously disproportionate that even the Blair-fawning New York Times cried foul in a recent editorial, the campaign - and its disturbing implications - go far beyond the issue of religious vestments. Indeed, the veil row is just a covering for what appears to be a deliberate, wide-ranging program of diversion and division, aimed at creating a scapegoat - "strangers in our midst," "the enemy within" - to bear the blame for the sins of the Blair government: the fear, repression, guilt, lies and rancor produced by the abomination in Iraq.

The anti-Muslim campaign is not merely rhetorical - although the heated rhetoric from Tony Blair and many of his ministers has certainly been bad enough, giving a patina of respectability to more extremist viewpoints, now seen as a legitimate part of the "national debate. (Much as the button-pushing imbroglio over immigration in the United States has transformed fringe white-power advocates into respectable media figures, lauded by the likes of Lou Dobbs and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and welcomed in the halls of Congress.) No, Blair's Islamophobia-fest has bite with its bark: not only the on-going evisceration of civil liberties, which has fallen almost entirely on British Muslims, but new measures as well - such as the Stasi-like plan to induce university professors and staff to spy on Muslim students and report all "suspicious" behavior to the security organs.

On October 16, the AP reported: "A verdict against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants charged with crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s will be announced Nov. 5, a senior court official said Monday. Sentences for those found guilty will be issued the same day," he said. An October 16 New York Times article noted: "Other court officials have said in recent days that a major reason for the delay is that after nine months of hearings, the five judges in the case have failed to reach agreement on a sentence for Mr. Hussein and appeared to be undecided between a death sentence for him or a penalty of life imprisonment."

In an October 17 entry on The Nation's weblog, The Notion, Nation Institute fellow Tom Engelhardt noted that the media, in reporting on the postponement, failed to mention that it had been postponed until two days before the midterm elections, writing, "It's the sort of thing that -- you would think -- that any reporter with knowledge of the US election cycle (no less of how [White House senior adviser] Karl Rove has worked these last years) would at least note in an article." While it cannot definitively be said that the verdict was, in fact, postponed so that it would influence the November elections, the postponement suggests several obvious questions, which the media have yet to raise: Are there still witnesses that the judges need to recall? If so, and if there is no verdict yet, how can there be a date certain for the verdict? How did the Iraqi court arrive at the November 5 date? Did Iraqi officials consult with U.S. officials in arriving at that date? More importantly, given the heavy influence of the United States on the court and given the administration's history -- evidenced below -- of timing national security-related actions to the political calendar, was the verdict's date set to provide maximum political benefit for the Bush administration and congressional Republicans?

American officials have heavy influence on the court

According to the Library of Congress, the SICT was established on October 9, 2005, by the Iraqi interim government for the sole purpose of trying Saddam and members of his regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The SICT was preceded by the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which was established in December 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Though the SICT is a creation of the Iraqi government, it is heavily influenced -- legally and financially -- by the U.S. government. An October 16, 2005, Human Rights Watch report found that the U.S. Embassy's Regime Crimes Liaison Office "played the lead role in many aspects of the operations of the SICT, including: the building of the courtroom, the conduct of exhumations, interviews with 'High Value Detainees', review of seized documents and preparation of an evidence database, and training of SICT staff."

The Washington Post reported on January 25:

The United States has made the prosecution of Hussein -- accused of presiding over the killings of hundreds of thousands of Shiites and Kurds -- one of its priorities since U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars of a $18.4 billion reconstruction package for Iraq to exhume mass graves and gather forensic evidence. It refurbished courthouses, trained Iraqi judges and provided most of the security for the courts. Americans drafted many of the statutes under which Hussein and his associates are being tried.

Though the United States is a strong opponent of the International Criminal Court, the administration's critics say it should have ensured adequate credibility and help for the Iraqi tribunal by making it international or, at a minimum, moving the trial out of Baghdad.

International qualms about the legality of the proceeding, and about the death sentence that Hussein could face if convicted, have left the United States virtually alone in shepherding his prosecution by the Iraqi government. A U.S. official in Baghdad confirmed last weekend that only the United States and Britain had contributed experts to advise the court on how to prosecute governments for war crimes and other such matters.

The official did not say how many British advisers were taking part; Britain, like other countries, has expressed reluctance to help in the case because it is a capital one.

The U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Regime Crimes Liaison Office run much of the day-to-day arrangements for the trial. Plainclothes security workers, many of them Americans, and Iraqi soldiers guard the turreted, fortress-like former Baath Party headquarters in the American-held Green Zone where the trial is playing out.

The New York Times reported on May 21 that "American influence" on the SICT "has been undeniably pervasive, with about 90 percent of the $145 million in annual costs for the court and associated investigations paid for by the United States Justice Department, and lawyers sent by Washington acting as advisers."

The Bush administration has a history of manipulating the timing of Iraq/terrorism announcements for political reasons

There have been several documented and reported instances of the Bush administration manipulating the timing of announcements or actions in the Iraq war and the fight against terrorism for their own political benefit.

• As Media Matters for America noted, on the October 24 broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, CBS News White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reported that a White House official told him, "[D]o not expect to see anything significant prior to Election Day" "as far as a significant change" in the Bush administration's Iraq policy and then quoted the official as saying: "You're not going to see anything before November 8th. It would be political suicide, and Karl Rove would never allow it."

• On September 6, Bush announced that 14 terror detainees had been transferred from secret CIA-run prisons to the Pentagon's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. As Media Matters noted, in an article for the September 18 edition of Newsweek, investigative correspondents Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff quoted an anonymous senior Bush aide acknowledging that Bush's announcement was timed in such a way that the administration might frame the debate over the fight against terrorism in the days before the September 11, 2001, anniversary:

The timing of last week's announcement, just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, was no accident. It allowed the White House to showcase its successes in capturing terrorists, and to put pressure on Congress to quickly approve the tribunals. "There were obviously messaging opportunities," says a senior Bush aide. "We could sit back and let the war be defined by the media and our critics, or we can define it ourselves."

Also, in his article for the September 10 edition of Time, White House correspondent Mike Allen reported that after Bush's announcement, the White House and Republican Party leaders almost immediately contacted conservatives in the media, urging them to promote Bush's speech "in the context of the election."

• As Media Matters noted, the media were almost totally silent regarding an October 11, 2004, Los Angeles Times report that the Bush administration planned to delay major assaults on insurgent strongholds in Iraq until after the 2004 U.S. presidential election, fearing large numbers of U.S. military casualties. At the time, TV news broadcasts did not mention the Times article prior to the election; however, on November 8, 2004, the top story on each of the major TV networks' morning shows was the U.S.-led forces' assault on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah.

• In 2005, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said that there were times during his tenure when the administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security into raising the terror threat level, even though there was little evidence warranting such a move, as Media Matters has noted. A May 10, 2005, USA Today article quoted Ridge from a forum he participated in that day in Washington, D.C.:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

[...]

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

According to a May 12, 2005, article in the Chicago Tribune, the White House immediately "dismissed" Ridge's allegations:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday that threat-level decisions are based on recommendations from a high-level council that gathers information about potential terrorism. When Ridge was in office, he was on the council with other key administration officials.

McClellan dismissed the notion that the White House pressured the council into higher levels of security.

"No one suggested that," he said.

However, others raised the issue. On the October 12, 2005, edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann documented 13 "coincidences" -- instances characterized by "a political downturn for the administration, followed by a 'terror event' -- a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." One such "coincidence" occurred on August 1, 2004, shortly after the Democratic National Convention had concluded. That day, the DHS raised the alert level for financial institutions in New York and Washington, citing "unusually specific" intelligence. But less than a week later, it came to light that the information that led to the warning was actually "three or four years old," according to an August 3, 2004, New York Times article.

• An article in the July 19, 2004, issue of The New Republic -- posted July 8 on the magazine's website -- quoted two sources from Pakistan's intelligence service and another from its Interior Ministry saying that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to make arrests of so-called "high-value targets" during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. On July 29, 2004, mere hours before Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Pakistani officials announced that they had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an Al Qaeda suspect in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Soon after, it came to light that the Pakistani government had actually arrested Ghailani four days earlier -- before the convention began -- but had delayed announcing the news until July 29.

• The Bush administration acknowledged that it timed the launch of its campaign to build public support for invading Iraq to coincide with the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the 2002 midterm elections. The New York Times reported (subscription required) on September 7, 2002:

White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

The rollout of the strategy this week, they said, was planned long before President Bush's vacation in Texas last month. It was not hastily concocted, they insisted, after some prominent Republicans began to raise doubts about moving against Mr. Hussein and administration officials made contradictory statements about the need for weapons inspectors in Iraq.

The White House decided, they said, that even with the appearance of disarray it was still more advantageous to wait until after Labor Day to kick off their plan.

"From a marketing point of view," said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, "you don't introduce new products in August."



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Slave Labor at US Embassy in Baghdad?

Inter Press Service
27/10/2006

Several months before a U.S. construction foreman named John Owen quit in disgust over what he said was blatant abuse of foreign laborers hired to build the sprawling new U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry witnessed similar events when he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Ore.

The gravelly-voiced, easygoing U.S. Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks U.S. contractors draw there, Mayberry snagged a $10,000-month job with MSDS consulting company.

MSDS is a two-person, minority-owned consulting company that assists U.S. State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti - Owen's employer - hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.
The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the U.S. Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help-wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Like Owen, Mayberry immediately sensed things weren't right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money, and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai," Mayberry said in an interview. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door - Gate 26 - that led to an unmarked, aging white 52-seat jet.

"All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti," Mayberry claimed, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he's not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he said. "I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai."

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledged that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq - a violation of U.S. contracting.

"All of the passports are kept in the offices," said one company insider who requested anonymity for fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, "It's because of the travel bans," he explained. Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India, and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.

"If you don't have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?" he asked. "How can they go to the U.S. State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?"

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

"There hadn't been any follow-up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds, and there were a lot of infections," he recalled. "The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I'm not sure they were even bathing."

In reports made available to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Army, and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand-washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers' medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized, and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store ... and then people were sent back to work."

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. "Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don't give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said 'that's how we do it.'"

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be "medical homicide," Mayberry says, because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or e-mails inquiring about Mayberry's allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Owen's account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially nonexistent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell, broke his back, and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness," Owen said.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently did nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown," Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager whom they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.

Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts of Owen and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claimed that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti "treats them like animals," and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.

Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declined to be named because of possible adverse consequences, said that Owen's and Mayberry's complaints only begin "to scratch the surface."

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. As of now, only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project's walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.



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'Stability First': Newspeak for rape of Iraq

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"Stay the course also means don't leave before the job is done. And that's ... we're going to get the job done in Iraq. And it's important that we do get the job done in Iraq." - George W Bush, October 11

Iraq is not simply a US electoral issue. It's a human tragedy of biblical proportions. Hence the urge at this point to situate the tragedy in a historical context.
In AD 750 the Abbasid Dynasty "de-Bedouinized" Islam by defeating the Ummayad Dynasty based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased being Arab-only and started to include Persia and the Turks. Islam turned into a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. "Baldach" - that's what European travelers called Baghdad up to the late 18th century - was catapulted to the center of the world.

From AD 786-809, under fabled Haroon al-Rashid - who established relations with Tang Dynasty China and the "illiterate emperor" Charlemagne - Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration and the postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual center in the world.

Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked for the first time by what was then the equivalent of Desert Storm - the Mongols riding their lightning-quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims.

In 1401, another foreign invader, the Turco-Mongol Tamerlan ("Timur the Lame"), devastated Baghdad yet again. In 2003, after the devastation of "shock and awe", came the Christian armies of President George W Bush. From the beginning the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in the popular imagination. Over time, Baghdadis - Sunni or Shi'ite - were saying, we will dictate our rhythm and impose ourselves over the occupiers. This is already happening.

Quagmire Iraq is not a 21st-century video game of Arabs playing extras in a slow-motion Armageddon. This is a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses. The story was engineered in Washington - and the plot would not be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears all the moral and legal responsibility for the destruction of the fabled former capital of the caliphate and the de facto Western flank of the Arab nation.

It is in this context that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.

The recent bloody holy month of Ramadan in Iraq has reflected the hellish mechanism unleashed by the invasion and occupation - the daily, gruesome banquet of death provoked by state-sponsored terror, counterinsurgency, stoked by sectarian hatred or the total collapse of the social contract.

This logic of extermination of a society and culture was inbuilt in the process since March 2003. In fact, the systematic annihilation of 2-3% of the entire Iraqi population, according to a study by The Lancet, not to mention the 1 million people displaced since March 2003, follow the more than 500,000 children who died during the 1990s as victims of United Nations sanctions. Iraq has been systematically destroyed for more than 15 years, non-stop.

And it gets worse, because for the Bush administration all this death and destruction is just a minor detail in the "big picture".

In a perverse replay of what happened in the Vietnamese jungles, the Pentagon lost the asymmetric guerrilla war raging in the Sunni belt. Sunni Arabs are totally alienated. Seventy percent are in favor of attacking the occupiers, no holds barred. No wonder Saddam Hussein is still popular. This month, about 500 Sunni Arab tribal chiefs and former Ba'ath Party officials in the police, army and intelligence got together in al-Hindiya, 25 kilometers west of Kirkuk, to pledge allegiance to Saddam, qualified as "supreme combatant and legitimate president".

It's true that Saddam's regime had already started to disintegrate from the inside after the Gulf War of 1991 - a process coupled with the devastating effects of UN sanctions. The resulting loss of civic spirit accelerated the re-tribalization of Iraq. Even as tribal affiliation nowadays is the only way to solve any problem in Iraq, for the silent majority what really matters is security: nobody is troubled by perceived (by the West) Sunni and Shi'ite divisions; and most Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen share plenty of social, cultural and commercial interests. Contrary to Western-propagated myth, Iraqi civil society as a whole - apart from a few factions - abhors civil war.

The coalition of the drilling
World public opinion must switch to red alert. The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided in December. The whole point is a new oil law - which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is the point of the US invasion - a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers' money spent. It's not war as politics by other means; it's war as free-market opening by other means - full US access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for "taming", in the near future, both Russia and China.

Very few observers have detailed what's at stake. In US corporate media the silence is stratospheric.

US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman duly landed in Baghdad this past summer, insisting that Iraqis must "pass a hydrocarbon law under which foreign companies can invest". Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was convinced, and said the law would be passed by the end of 2006, as promised to the IMF.

No wonder: the Green Zone US Embassy colossus has always made sure that the US controls - via well-paid Iraqi servants - the Petroleum Ministry, as well as all key management posts in key Iraqi ministries. The draft hydrocarbon law was reviewed by the IMF, reviewed by Bodman and reviewed by Big Oil executives. It was not and it will not be reviewed by Iraqi civil society: that was left to the fractious Iraqi parliament - which can be largely bought for a fistful of dinars.

The Bush administration needs somebody to sign the law. The nation of Iraq as it emerged out of British imperial design is an artificial construct that can only be "tamed" by a hardcore strongman a la Saddam. It has to be "our" strongman, of course: when Saddam started to act independently he was smashed. Insistent rumors of a US-engineered coup to replace the hapless current premier Nuri al-Maliki have surfaced of late. Poor Maliki, if he clings to a minimum of integrity, can't possibly sign the oil law. Enter the Washington/Green Zone-backed strongman a la Saddam: a likely candidate is former interim premier Iyad Allawi, who ordered the destruction of Fallujah in late 2004.

No matter what happens in the US mid-term elections next month, this is the post-December scenario: Iraq enslaved by the IMF; Big Oil signing mega-lucrative production sharing agreements (PSAs); "partial" troop withdrawal; relentless guerrilla warfare; further disintegration; open road to partition.

Vast swaths of the US electorate have now understood how the whole Iraqi adventure has been built on lies: lies about the causes of war, lies about the methodology of war, lies about the terrible consequences of war. Inevitably, the current media-targeted avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak had to be also meaningless. This includes "phased withdrawal", "empowering" the Iraqi government, "putting security ahead of democracy" and "partitioning Iraq". Surrealism in international relations would reach new highs (or lows) with the US ordering by decree that a sovereign nation must dismember itself. Compared with it, the current carnage in Baghdad - which is already divided anyway - would be a Disney flick.

There's more: the Shakespearean despair over "Redeploy and Contain" or "Stability First" - newspeak coined by Bush family consegliere James Baker's Iraq Study Group, staffed with plenty of pro-war neo-conservatives. A notorious casualty of the newspeak war seems to be "stay the course" - replaced, according to Press Secretary Tony Snow, by "a study in constant motion". Anyway, the winner - after the mid-term elections - will be "Stability First", which is basically a remix, with a horn section, of "stay the course".

How can Americans - and world public opinion - be engaged in serious, meaningful debate when the Iraq tragedy is reduced to a mere catch phrase? This incoherent whirlwind, this "study in constant motion", is the travesty that passes for Iraqi policy debate among educated elites.

Another reading is more ominous. It spells the Bush administration and its attached elites losing control - of everything. And that's how they can become even more dangerous. On October 19, Vice President Dick Cheney once again stated that the only way out in Iraq was "total victory". A recent historical parallel is nothing but gloomy. When the US was confronted with defeat in Vietnam, it did not "Redeploy and Contain": on the contrary, death and destruction were extended to Laos and Cambodia. Baker's "Stability First" might contain undisclosed subtexts.

"Total victory", in Cheney's world view, means that the Bush administration was not, is not and will never be interested in Iraqi, or Middle Eastern, "democracy". What matters is control of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on the planet, 112 billion barrels of it in proven reserves plus 220 billion barrels still to be exploited, at a cost as low as US$1 a barrel; a cluster of sprawling military bases; the largest embassy/fortress-by-the-Tigris in the world; and the indispensable client regime.

In sum: a "Coalition of the Drilling" secured by the Pentagon's Long War apparatus. It's up to ancient and proud Baghdad to spoil the party. Baghdad survived and buried Hulagu. Baghdad survived and buried Tamerlan. Baghdad may as well survive and bury George W Bush.



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La Vida Loca

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Christian Zionism: An Egregious Threat to U.S. - Middle East Understanding

Council for the National Interest

Christian Zionism, a belief that paradise for Christians can only be achieved once Jews are in control of the Holy Land, is gathering strength in the United States and forging alliances that are giving increasingly weird shape to American policy toward the Middle East. The nature of the movement and its detrimental impact on policy was the subject of the 22nd Capitol Hill public hearing presented by the Council for the National Interest yesterday.

A new Zogby International poll commissioned by the CNI Foundation shows that 31 percent of those surveyed in the national poll strongly believe or somewhat believe in the ideas behind Christian Zionism, defined as "the belief that Jews must have all of the promised land, including all of Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah." Other polls bear similar messages, that 53% of Americans believe that Israel was given by God to the Jews (Pew), and that 59% of the American public believes the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelations will come true (CNN/Time.)
The international implications of such beliefs are profound, as an increasing number of Americans believe that God sets foreign policy goals. Rev. Robert O. Smith, Lutheran pastor at the University of Chicago, one of the speakers at the hearing, discussed the development of this belief that dates to the 19th century and how it has received a powerful new impetus with the founding this year of a new group of the Christian right called Christians United for Israel (CUFI). And yet while it works closely with Jewish Zionist organizations in the US, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to promote the continued occupation of Palestine by the Israel (land God has given the Jews), it works just as effectively in dehumanizing the original inhabitants of the Holy Land, both Muslims and Christians.

Another speaker, Rammy Haija, who teaches at Radford University, drew attention to the necessity in the Christian Zionist dogma for the Israelis to retain control not only of the whole of the occupied territory but also all of Jerusalem. Christian Zionists have pushed the militarist policies of both Israel and the U.S. in an effort to secure the Holy Land in preparation for the coming of the "promised land." As part of this strategy, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is deemed absolutely necessary.

The irony of the alliance between Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists is that the one ideology promotes the ultimate destruction of the other. As Smith pointed out, the "Christians United for Israel" is all about Israel, not about the Israelis, and only a little surface digging into Christian Zionism shows how anti-Semitic it really is. So much so that Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the ceaseless champions of Zionism in this country, has called the Christian right one of the direst threats to American Jews. This has not prevented top Israeli officials from paying homage to the Christian right, including Ariel Sharon (before he descended into a comatose state brought on by the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza, Pat Robertson opined), the Israeli ambassador Daniel Ayalon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and a host of others. The ability of CUFI and other far right Christian religious leaders like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson to raise money for Israel, including Israeli settlements, is well documented.

Christian Zionism, Smith concluded, has a fundamental lack of earthly concerns, is divorced from reality, and undermines the work of politics. Its practical impact is the killing of people in the Holy Land. The recent statement by the Christian religious leaders of Jerusalem that warned against Christian Zionism's policies of racist intolerance and perpetual war was much needed, but it should have come from America's religious leaders.



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US warned of ballot box chaos as elections near

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian


Six years after the emergence of the now infamous "hanging chad" in the 2000 presidential elections, monitoring groups warn that technological glitches and hackers could throw next month's mid-term elections into chaos.

With polling day less than two weeks away, a report this week by electionline.org, a non-partisan organisation, anticipates problems at the ballot box in as many as 10 states.

"Machine failures, database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new equipment have some predicting chaos at the polls at worst, and widespread polling place snafus at best," the report says.


The mid-term elections will be the first national test of new voting procedures introduced in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, when it took a month of court challenges and recounts of punch-card ballots before George W Bush was declared to have won the state, and became president.

In the wake of that fiasco, Congress allotted $3.8bn (£2bn) to the states to modernise voting lists and replace the old-style punch-card systems with electronic voting machines by early 2006.

Election officials in more than 30 states opted for touch-screen voting machines that use a series of prompts to guide voters through the ballot. But the new machines have merely reawakened the old anxieties about miscounted votes and deliberate fraud.

In many states, voters will be casting their votes electronically for the first time. The officials at the polling stations may be equally inexperienced, and because such workers are typically elderly and retired, critics say they may be particularly poorly equipped to deal with any technological problems.

Those concerns crystallised last month, when a Princeton professor of computer science, Edward Felton, and two colleagues managed to hack into a new electronic voting machine without detection and install a virus that could alter vote counts - and go on to infect a wider network of machines.

The exercise, which Mr Felton repeated on television, took about a minute to complete. The manufacturers of the voting machine said Mr Felton had ignored newer software and security measures that safeguard against hacking.

However, vote monitoring organisations and computer scientists have grown increasingly wary about the new voting machines, especially those that do not leave a paper trail in case it is needed for future verification.

The rollout of the new systems has been far from smooth. In Maryland, earlier this autumn, voting was delayed for hours across an entire county because election officials forgot to bring in the electronic cards that activate the touch-screen machines.

During the 2004 elections in North Carolina, polling officials failed to notice the constant flashing of a warning light on the voting machine indicating that its memory was full. More than 4,400 votes were lost as the result of their inattention. In that same election year, a software error in Texas polling stations led to a vote overcount, with 100,000 more votes registered than had been cast.

The Electionline study predicts 10 states could face similar fiascos this time around because of computer security, inexperienced or elderly poll workers, and a network of new regulations meant to prevent illegal immigrants from voting.

Over the period of the past six years, the number of states requiring voters to show identification before they are given a ballot has risen from just 11 states to 24 states this year.

The study said it anticipated problems in Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state.

Comment: The evidence continues to pour in: there is no such thing as voting in the US. To believe there is voting is to believe a lie. The pretense is there to placate the masses as they are being lead to the slaughter.

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Spoiled Milk Sparks School Evacuation

Associated Press

SWARTZ CREEK, Mich. - A plastic bottle with foul-smelling contents that was found in a men's bathroom at Swartz Creek High School two weeks ago prompted an evacuation and a visit by the bomb squad. But lab results show that the bottle contained spoiled milk.
The bottle had been sitting in a student's locker and was left on the ledge in the bathroom, The Flint Journal reported Tuesday. It was found Oct. 9 and officials initially said they believed it contained a mix of household chemicals.

"It looks like it was chocolate milk, old, spoiled and under pressure," Superintendent Jeff Pratt said.

Pressure from the spoiled milk apparently caused the bottle to expand, making it look more suspicious. Pratt said school officials erred on the side of caution, noting that possible threats can't be taken for granted.

"Two police officers and three members of the bomb squad refused to go near it or touch it, and that was good enough for me," Pratt said.

Students were evacuated to the football field and later dismissed. It turns out a student had cleaned out his girlfriend's locker, found the bottle and accidentally left in the bathroom, the newspaper said.

Swartz Creek Police Chief Rick Clolinger said the milk was inside a clear, nearly 16-ounce water bottle.

"I know that after the fact it makes us look on the silly side, that we sent kids home because of spoiled milk on the shelf," Clolinger said. "But all of the right decisions were made."

Comment: The Bush Doctrine of spreading fear is working exactly as planned.

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Passport police wipe smiles off applicants' faces

The Register
25/10/2006

Little girl and public enemy #1 both snubbed

A nine-year-old girl had her half term holiday cancelled because her teeth were showing in her passport photograph, reported The Sun newspaper.

Alys Edwards paid a last minute visit to the passport office to renew her passport with her parents in Peterborough, but was told that a photograph with teeth would overload the machine that read it.

Digital photographs have been stuck on the first generation biometric passports so computers can compare them to databases of people wanted by the police.

But the systems have not been programmed to understand that little girls are more likely to smile in photographs than plant bombs on aeroplanes.
The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) also shredded the travel plans of their sometime nemesis - Simon Davies of campaign group Privacy International.

Davies has been fighting for people's privacy against state schemes like Identity Cards and biometric passports for some 20 years. Last year, he was labelled privacy enemy #1, and claimed the government was trying to sully his name after being identified as one of many contributors to an academic report that was critical of the ID Card scheme.

On Monday he, like the Edwards', was told he couldn't renew his passport - this time it was a London office and this time it was because an inch of laminate covering the data page of his passport had come free.

As a consequence, instead of renewing, he would have to apply for a new passport, the IPS staff said. IPS staff didn't bat an eyelid after being shown newspaper clippings with his photo and other proof of his identity.

Moments earlier Davies had been the centre of a disturbance that had three security guards run to his attention. A wasp had taken to the air round his head while he was standing at the counter. The staff scattered, while the guards tried to swipe the wasp.

Davies told The Register he had been suspected of bringing the wasp into the office. His plans to speak at a UN conference on internet governance next Monday have also been cancelled



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Health Matters

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Expert casts doubt on flu vaccine

Press Association
Friday October 27, 2006 3:58 AM

Flu vaccines may not be as effective as people think, an expert has warned.

There is little clinical evidence that the vaccines have an effect on things like hospital stay, time off work, death in healthy adults or even those with conditions like asthma and cystic fibrosis, he said.
Vaccines given to children under the age of two have the same effect as if they were given a dummy drug, he added.

Tom Jefferson, co-ordinator of the vaccines field of the highly-respected Cochrane Collaboration, called for an "urgent" re-evaluation of vaccination campaigns.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he said that, because influenza viruses mutate and vary from year to year, it was difficult for scientists to study the precise effects of vaccines.

Most studies are of poor quality, and there is little comparative evidence on the safety of the vaccines, he said.

In addition, policy makers wanted to be seen to be doing something, all of which leads to a "large gap" between policy and the evidence, he said.

The difficulty in distinguishing between flu and flu-like illness added to the confusion, with some illnesses listed as flu when they were not, he said.

Earlier this month, there were fears that vulnerable people in the UK might have to wait for flu jabs after the Government confirmed stocks would arrive late.

The jab is given to high-risk groups first, including the over-65s, people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, and those with chronic conditions such as diabetes.



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Is A Federal Smoking Ban A Good Idea?

KXAN

A recent poll claims that nearly half of Americans support a federal law that would make cigarettes illegal in the next five to 10 years. The poll, conducted by Zogby International with the Drug Policy Alliance, says that 57% of 18-29 year olds were in favor of the idea.

This as the CDC reports Thursday that the number of Americans who smoke is levelling off and not dropping enough to meet the government's goal of significantly reducing smoking by 2010.




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Colloidal silver antibacterial liquid sprayed on Hong Kong subways as public health measure

October 23, 2006
News Target

Subway and train stations in London and other parts of the UK are considering using a powerful, non-toxic colloidal silver disinfectant spray to help fend off the spread of the flu virus this winter after Hong Kong subways recently announced its use of the spray.

The MTR company revealed this morning its plan to use nano silver-titanium dioxide coating (NSTDC) spray on most surfaces on the Hong Kong metro rail system. Roughly 2.5 million commuters ride the Hong Kong rail system every day, and can easily spread colds and the flu through common surfaces.
The NSTDC disinfectant spray has been certified as effective at killing wide ranges of bacteria, mold and viruses, including the H1N1 virus. MTR announced it would be sprayed on all escalator handrails, Add Value machines, the buttons on ticket issuing machines and all handrails and buttons in elevators in the company's Hong Kong stations. The colloidal silver spray would also be applied to all grab poles and straps within the trains.

"Germs and diseases are most commonly transmitted through the hands," said MTS safety and quality manager George Lee. "They pick up bacteria from public surfaces, which may then be passed into our bodies if we rub our eyes, nose or mouth before washing our hands."

A spokesman for Transport for London (TfL) said London Underground is in the process of developing anti-flu measures with the UK government and other agencies, including the possibility of using NSTDC spray in tube stations.

"We are in regular contact with other metro networks from cities around the world, including MTS in Hong Kong, and we share the best practices and technological innovations. We would, of course, be interested in any measures which could be shown to be effective," the TfL spokesman said.

Consumer health advocate Mike Adams, author of "How to Beat the Bird Flu," said colloidal silver has well-documented antibacterial properties.

"It works so well against bacterial strains -- even antibiotic-resistant strains -- that it has been under constant attack in the United States by the FDA, which sees it as a threat to the profits of drug companies that manufacture prescription antibiotics," Adams said.



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Good News Day

Scott Adam's
Dilbert's Blog

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It's something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis. It happens to people in my age bracket.
I asked my doctor - a specialist for this condition - how many people have ever gotten better. Answer: zero. While there's no cure, painful Botox injections through the front of the neck and into the vocal cords can stop the spasms for a few months. That weakens the muscles that otherwise spasm, but your voice is breathy and weak.

The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can't talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage. And most people with this condition report they have the most trouble talking on the telephone or when there is background noise. I can speak normally alone, but not around others. That makes it sound like a social anxiety problem, but it's really just a different context, because I could easily sing to those same people.

I stopped getting the Botox shots because although they allowed me to talk for a few weeks, my voice was too weak for public speaking. So at least until the fall speaking season ended, I chose to maximize my onstage voice at the expense of being able to speak in person.

My family and friends have been great. They read my lips as best they can. They lean in to hear the whispers. They guess. They put up with my six tries to say one word. And my personality is completely altered. My normal wittiness becomes slow and deliberate. And often, when it takes effort to speak a word intelligibly, the wrong word comes out because too much of my focus is on the effort of talking instead of the thinking of what to say. So a lot of the things that came out of my mouth frankly made no sense.

To state the obvious, much of life's pleasure is diminished when you can't speak. It has been tough.

But have I mentioned I'm an optimist?

Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn't mean I can't be the first. So every day for months and months I tried new tricks to regain my voice. I visualized speaking correctly and repeatedly told myself I could (affirmations). I used self hypnosis. I used voice therapy exercises. I spoke in higher pitches, or changing pitches. I observed when my voice worked best and when it was worst and looked for patterns. I tried speaking in foreign accents. I tried "singing" some words that were especially hard.

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That's consistent with any expert's best guess of what's happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It's somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar - but still different enough - from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I'm no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn't considered. A poem isn't singing and it isn't regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it's just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal.

When I say my brain remapped, that's the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn't get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn't just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

I still don't know if this is permanent. But I do know that for one day I got to speak normally. And this is one of the happiest days of my life.

But enough about me. Leave me a comment telling me the happiest moment of YOUR life. Keep it brief. Only good news today. I don't want to hear anything else.



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Moderate Drinking May Boost Memory, Study Suggests

Science Daily

In the long run, a drink or two a day may be good for the brain.
Researchers found that moderate amounts of alcohol - amounts equivalent to a couple of drinks a day for a human - improved the memories of laboratory rats.

Such a finding may have implications for serious neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, said Matthew During, the study's senior author and a professor of molecular virology, immunology and cancer genetics at Ohio State University .

"There is some evidence suggesting that mild to moderate alcohol consumption can protect against diseases like Alzheimer's in humans," said During. "But it's not apparent how this happens."

He and his colleague, Margaret Kalev-Zylinska, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, uncovered a neuronal mechanism that may help explain the link between alcohol and improved memory.

"We saw a noticeable change on the surface of certain neurons in rats that were given alcohol," During said. "This change may have something to do with the positive effects of alcohol on memory."

The researchers presented their findings at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Atlanta.

During and Kalev-Zylinska designed a special liquid diet for the rats. One formulation included a low dose of alcohol, comparable to two or three drinks a day for a human, while the other diet included a much higher dose of alcohol, comparable to six or seven drinks a day for a human. A third group of rats was given a liquid diet without alcohol. All animals were given their respective diets daily for about four weeks.

The researchers measured the rats' blood-alcohol levels three times throughout the study. Toward the end of the study, they subjected the rats to two different memory tasks.

For the first task, the rats were given several minutes to examine two identical, square plastic objects. After a certain amount of time, a researcher replaced one of the objects with a new, round object made of glass. The researchers measured the amount of time that each rat spent checking out the new object - an indication that the animal recognizes it as a new object.

Rats given low doses of alcohol spent about three times longer examining the new object than did rats on the alcohol-free diet. Rats given the high dose of alcohol spent equivalent amounts of time checking out both objects, suggesting that they were unable to differentiate the old object from the new one.

For the second task rats were placed in a box with two chambers separated by a door. One chamber was well-lit, while the adjacent chamber was dark. After placing a rat in the well-lit chamber and then lifting the door, the researchers timed how quickly the rats entered the dark chamber (rats are nocturnal, and naturally prefer dark spaces.) Once inside the dark chamber, the rat received a mild electric shock to its feet.

The researchers repeated this same experiment 24 hours later, and kept track of how long it took the animal to enter the dark chamber. Many of the animals re-entered the dark area, yet the rats given alcohol waited anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 times longer to enter the dark chamber than did the animals given the alcohol-free diet.

"The results suggest that both doses of alcohol moderately improved the animals' ability to remember this negative event, since they seemed hesitant to go into the dark area," During said. "It also suggests that high levels of alcohol can reinforce bad memories.

"People who drink to forget bad memories may actually be doing the opposite by reinforcing the neural circuits that control negative emotional memory," he continued.

At the end of the study, the researchers analyzed brain and liver tissue from each animal.

They found that low levels of alcohol increased the expression of a particular receptor, NR1, on the surface of neurons in a region of the brain, the hippocampus, that plays a role in memory. Researchers think that NR1 plays a role in memory and learning.

In a separate set of experiments, During and Kalev-Zylinska increased the number of NR1 receptors in another group of rats, and found that this boost improved the animals' memories to an extent similar to the improvement seen in the rats given low doses of alcohol. They also they used a new gene transfer technique to knock down the NR1 receptors in a group of rats given alcohol - alcohol had no memory-enhancing effects on these animals.

"These experiments suggest that the effect of alcohol works through the NR1 receptor, at least where memory and learning are concerned," During said.

"We didn't see any toxic effects of low-level alcohol consumption on the brain or the liver," During said. "It didn't damage neurons nor did it cause liver damage during the short study. But the higher dose of alcohol damaged both."



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Looking Up

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Study: sun has sisters at birth

www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-26 20:59:57

BEIJING, Oct. 26 (Xinhuanet) -- The sun, our medium-sized yellow star, was far from alone when it was formed, with hundred of thousands of siblings, according to a new research on Thursday.
"The evidence for the solar sisters was found in daughters--such as decayed particles from radioactive isotopes of iron--trapped in meteorites, which can be studied as fossil remnants of the early solar system," said Leslie Looney, who arrived at the solar sibling finding along with his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

These daughter species allowed Looney and his colleagues to discern that a supernova with the mass of about 20 suns exploded relatively near the early sun when it formed 4.6 billion years ago; and where there are supernovas or any massive star, you also see hundreds to thousands of sun-like stars, he said.

The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull, Looney said, leaving the sisters "lost in space" and our sun looking like an only child ever since.



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Two eyes to keep watch on sun 'burps'

The Age
Cape Canaveral
October 27, 2006

NASA has launched twin solar observatories in a two-year mission to study the sun's eruptions and their impact on Earth.
A three-stage Boeing Delta II rocket lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station yesterday.

The nearly identical spacecraft of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission were to separate from the rocket 25 minutes after launch and deploy their solar-powered antennas two minutes later.

The observatories, each about the size of a golf cart, are equipped with 16 instruments that will provide the first images in three dimensions of the sun and its corona once in orbit.

An Australian tracking station will be the first to receive data from the mission that hopes to predict solar "burps".

NASA will use the moon's gravity like a pinball flipper to send them into opposite and slightly distinct orbits around the sun.

The first satellite will orbit ahead of the Earth in its rotation around the sun and the second will follow Earth, allowing for a look at the sun and its mass coronal ejections, which are the most violent storms in the solar system.

The two spacecraft will be the first to view the sun from two separate vantage points outside Earth's orbit, stereoscopic vision that permits a 3D image.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to have the first 3D images in mid-December.

The burps, sudden large explosions of very hot gas from the sun, can knock out communications satellites and cause havoc with electronic equipment on Earth.

Scientists hope the mission will glean insight into solar activities such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), the most violent explosions in our solar system.

When aimed at Earth, these billion-tonne eruptions of the sun's corona spew intense radiation, severely disrupting the Earth's environment and endangering astronauts and scientific spacecraft.

Information gleaned on the origins and behaviours of CMEs would allow more accurate forecasting, which would improve planning for space missions as well as over-the-pole flights, satellite communications and video transmissions.



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Wow! Striking Green Comet Suddenly Visible in Evening Sky

space.com

What had been a modest comet seen only with binoculars or telescopes flared up this week to become visible to the naked eye.
Comet Swan, as it is called, is in the western sky after sunset from the Northern Hemisphere. It remains faint, likely not easy to find under bright city lights but pretty simple to spot from the countryside.

It is a "fairly easy naked-eye comet," said Pete Lawrence, who photographed the comet from the UK. "The tail is now showing some interesting features too."

UPDATE: Late Thursday, however, Lawrence reported that the comet already may be getting dimmer. It is not clear what skywatchers should expect of this comet.

Find it

The comet, also catalogued as C/2006 M4, is about halfway up in the sky in the direction of the constellation Corona Borealis [Sky Map].

As with most comets, this one looks like a fuzzy star. It has an interesting green tint, however, indicating it has a lot of the poisonous gas cyanogen and diatomic carbon, astronomers say.

Sam Storch, a long-time sky watcher from Long Island, NY, said the comet appears "quite a bit deeper than any other green I have seen in any sky object, even planetary nebulae."

"Comet Swan is very easy to find," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist. "In good binoculars it appears as a bright, symmetrical and surprisingly green blob."

Legendary objects

Comets, the stuff of legend and myth, are frozen leftovers of the solar system's formation. Most orbit the Sun out beyond Neptune, but a few wander through the inner solar system now and then. As a comet gets closer to the Sun, solar radiation boils the frozen gases, along with dust, off the comet's surface. Sunlight reflects off this material, creating a head, or coma. Some comets never get very bright. Others brighten dramatically. Some even come unglued as they round the Sun.

Some comets, like Swan, also sport a tail or two. Such detail is best seen with binoculars or a small telescope.

Comet Swan was discovered last year. It makes its closest approach to Earth today. Eventually it will return to the distant reaches of the solar system. Rao said nobody knows how long the comet will grace the night sky.

Comment: Original story has pic.

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Star Explosion is Suprisingly Neat & Tidy

Jeanna Bryner
space.com

Stars don't always rip apart in violent explosions. Some blow up in an orderly fashion.

A star named Cassiopeia A blew up in such a tidy manner that it retained much of its original onion-like layering [image].
We've found new bits of the 'onion' layers that had not been seen before," said co-researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. "This tells us that the star's explosion was not chaotic enough to stir its remains into one big pile of mush."

The work was led by Jessica Ennis, also of the University of Minnesota.

Heated explosion

Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is a supernova remnant within our Milky Way Galaxy, located 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The original star, about 15 to 20 times more massive than our Sun, died in a cataclysmic supernova.

Like all mature, massive stars, the Cas A star was once neat and tidy, consisting of concentric shells made up of various chemical elements: The outer layers held lighter elements, such as hydrogen, the middle layers were lined with heavier elements like neon, and its core was stacked with the heaviest elements such as iron.

Until now, scientists couldn't figure out what happened to the star when it ripped apart. One idea purported the star exploded in a more or less uniform fashion, flinging its layers out in successive order. If this were the case, those layers should be preserved in the expanding debris. While previous observations revealed parts of some of these layers, others were missing.

Missing pieces

NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope gave astronomers a never-seen-before look at the missing pieces.

"Spitzer has essentially found key missing pieces of the Cassiopeia A puzzle," Ennis said.

When a massive star explodes, it creates two types of shock waves. The forward shock wave darts out quickest, and, in the case of Cas A, is now traveling at supersonic speeds up to 4,600 miles per second (7,400 kilometers per second). When the forward wave slams into ejected stellar material, a reverse shock wave is created that tags along behind the forward shock wave at slightly slower speeds [video].

Stellar material thrown out fastest hits the shock wave sooner, giving it more time to heat up to scorching temperatures that could be detected with X-ray and visible-light telescopes. More sluggish chunks hit the shock wave later so they are cooler and radiate infrared light that couldn't be observed until Spitzer came along.

The lagging chunks are made up of gas and dust containing neon, oxygen and aluminum - elements from the middle layers of the original star.

The study will be detailed in the Nov. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.



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Slippery Slope

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New-home prices drop 9.7% from 2005, biggest fall in 35 years

USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) - The median price of a new home plunged in September the largest amount in more than 35 years, even as the pace of sales rose for a second month.
The Commerce Department said the median price for a new home sold in September was $217,100, down 9.7% from September 2005.

That was the lowest median price for a new home since September 2004 and the sharpest year-over-year decline since December 1970. The weakness in new-home prices was even sharper than a 2.5% fall in the price of existing homes last month, which had been the biggest drop on record.
The price decline for new homes came while the sales pace picked up, rising 5.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.075 million homes. It was the second consecutive increase in sales, after three months of declines.

Still, September sales were down 14.2% from September 2005.

The supply of homes available for sale at the current sales pace fell to 6.4 months' worth from 6.8 months in August. There were 557,000 homes available for sale at the end of September, down 1.9% from 568,000 in August.

New-home sales rose 23.9% in the West in September and 6.9% in the South. They fell 34.5% in the Northeast and 6.3% in the Midwest.

The rise in sales last month was led by a 23.9% jump in the West. Sales were also up 6.9% in the South. Sales fell by 34.5% in the Northeast and were down 6.3% in the Midwest.

The Commerce Department's report on new-home sales in September came a day after a real estate trade group said existing home sales slipped in September for a sixth straight month. The National Association of Realtors said home resales slowed to an annual rate of 6.18 million from a 6.30 million pace in August.



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U.S. Stock-Index Futures Retreat; General Motors, Ford Decline

By Ludwig Burger
Oct. 27
Bloomberg

U.S. stock-index futures declined before a government report that will probably show the economy grew in the third quarter at the slowest pace this year.

"We see the weakening of the economy and of course there's some concern,'' said Peter Seipel, a U.S. equity strategist at Frankfurt Trust Investment-Gesellschaft mbH, which oversees about $15 billion. "The upward potential for U.S. stocks may have been exhausted in the short term after the recent rally.''

General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., the nation's two biggest automakers, fell in Europe after the Wall Street Journal said the largest U.S. car dealer plans to cut orders. Microsoft Corp. slid even after the world's largest software producer reported an increase in first-quarter profit.

Standard & Poor's 500 Index futures expiring in December lost 1.8 to 1391.1 as of 10:35 a.m. in London. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures sank 15 to 12,174. Nasdaq-100 Index futures declined 2.25 to 1750.75.

Stocks yesterday extended a weeklong advance in the U.S., pushing the S&P 500 toward a 4 percent gain in October, its best month since 2003. Lower oil prices have improved the outlook for companies most sensitive to consumer spending.

Economic growth cooled to a 2 percent annual rate from July through September as housing slumped and automakers slashed output, economists said before a Commerce Department report that is due today at 8:30 Washington time.

The forecast is based on the median estimate of 78 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. The economy grew at a 2.6 percent pace in the second quarter.

GM, Ford

GM fell 32 cents to $34.04 in Germany, and Ford dropped 6 cents to $8.42. AutoNation Inc., the largest U.S. retailer of new and used cars, plans to cut orders to the Big Three automakers, which also include Germany-based DaimlerChrysler AG, by 30 percent because of a backlog of unsold vehicles, the Journal said, citing AutoNation's Chief Executive Officer Mike Jackson.

Microsoft lost 4 cents to $28.31. The maker of the Windows software reported profit rose 11 percent in first-quarter to $3.48 billion. Sales of software for server computers surpassed analysts' estimates.

McAfee Inc. rose $1.34 to $28.16. The world's second- biggest maker of security software yesterday said third-quarter profit was 36 cents a share, excluding some items, after selling more programs to consumers and businesses. That topped the average 30-cent estimate in a Thomson Financial survey.

Silicon Image Inc. yesterday dropped $1.93 to $12.26 in extended U.S. trading. The maker of semiconductors for high- speed communications said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to fall 3 percent to 5 percent from the previous three months. The shares didn't trade in Europe.

Baker Hughes, Chevron

Baker Hughes Inc., the world's third-largest oilfield contractor, reported third-quarter profit rose to $1.09 a share, from 65 cents a year earlier as increased exploration for oil and natural gas boosted demand for its services. Revenue rose 29 percent. The stock didn't trade in Europe.

Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil company, and Alltel Corp., the biggest regional wireless carrier, are also expected to report results today.

The S&P 500 yesterday added 6.86, or 0.5 percent, to 1389.08. The Dow average increased 28.98, or 0.2 percent, to 12,163.66, reaching a fourth consecutive record even as Boeing Co. and GM fell. The Nasdaq rose 22.51, or 1 percent, to 2379.1, a level not seen since February 2001.



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The Next Job Outsourced to India Could Be Yours

By Mark Gilbert
Bloomberg

"We Think, They Sweat,'' wrote author and former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler in an article on Asian manufacturing and the U.S. trade deficit for the Wall Street Journal two years ago. If "they'' start thinking for us as well, maybe we are the ones who should be sweating.
When you hear the words "outsourcing to India,'' what springs to mind? Customer-service grunts answering queries in call centers from prepared scripts, perhaps? Number crunchers processing and cleaning digits in a data farm? Low-level programmers knitting bits of software?

Here are a few alternative visions. Master of Business Administration graduates scrutinizing earnings reports and regulatory filings in a Bangalore research laboratory, and publishing buy/sell notes. Master of Science holders in Chennai analyzing the debt profiles of global borrowers and writing research about their creditworthiness. Doctors of mathematics in a Mumbai trading room shifting billions of dollars between stocks, bonds, currencies and derivatives, going head-to-head with the guys and girls in New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore.

Instead of relying on countries such as India just to cut wage costs, the world's smartest companies are likely to start tapping Asia for brainpower. Since global investment banks claim to be stuffed with people skilled at divining how to make companies as efficient as possible, they should be leading the charge to hire knowledge workers in locations other than the world's main financial centers.

'Talent Pool'

"Globalization means that banks will increasingly be looking to places like India for future hiring,'' says Steve Major, global head of fixed-income strategy at HSBC Holdings Plc in London. "If your strategy is to just focus on cost, you're doomed to fail. You have to look at deepening the talent pool first, getting the quality employees.''

Entry-level jobs in bank research departments have been the first to drift to India. As regulators around the world cracked down on allegations of bias in recent years, research lost its subsidies from investment banking. Banks responded by slashing the volume of analysis, and cleaving the cheaper business of building spreadsheets from the more costly exercise of writing reports and marketing trading ideas to clients.

"The analytical need to keep the roles whole clashed with an operational need,'' says Darren Sharma, the founder of Frontline Analysts in Bangalore. "We're essentially tribal. Customers weren't keen on receiving market views from a place that wasn't on their mental map.''

Credit Research

That resistance is slowly fading, he says. Frontline has a team of three senior analysts assessing the creditworthiness of financial-services companies for WestLB AG, Germany's third- biggest state-owned bank and Sharma's former employer, where he spent five years as a London-based credit strategist. He's in negotiations to build a second team for WGZ Bank Group, a central and wholesale bank for 240 of Germany's cooperative lenders.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has more than 80 analysts in India, while Merrill Lynch & Co. and Morgan Stanley each employ more than 50 there. Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Bangalore office will soon reach 1,500 employees, overtaking its Tokyo office as the firm's third-largest, the Financial Times reported last month.

That shift has been driven by cost. The average 2005 Wall Street salary was almost $290,000, according to a report this month from New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi. That's about 6.6 times more than the nation's average per-capita income of $43,740, based on World Bank data.

Beyond Cost

Apply that multiple to India's average income of $720, and you get to an annual salary of a bit more than $4,700. Even at three or four times that level for qualified banking staff in India, the cost attractions are clear.

"Research has now become a cost which cannot be subsidized by the banking business,'' says Krishnan Sakotai of Karvy Global Services in Hyderabad, India. "On the other hand, there are some firms who are also outsourcing research in order to gain competitive advantage, something beyond just cost.'' Sakotai runs a team of about 33 people selling research to banks and brokerages.

Most of the hiring so far has been for junior workers in low-level jobs. Frontline's Sharma says that has led to disenchantment among highly qualified Indian employees frustrated at the lack of opportunity for promotion. "You have to recruit commensurate to the job offered,'' he says.

For now, senior analyst positions in India are more likely to be in bond research than in stock analysis, Sharma says. "Fixed income never had data crunchers versus opinion formers,'' he says. "Equity analysts aren't always opinion owners, whereas all fixed-income analysts publish.''

Traders Next?

Once you have a research team in India, it might make sense to open a trading floor. Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's biggest bank, is hiring staff in Mumbai for its Global Markets Center, according to a recruitment e-mail from Ma Foi Management Consultants Ltd., which says it is India's largest human- resources service provider.

The jobs on offer include creating hedging strategies for the bank's energy customers, advising insurers and pension funds on multi-asset investments, and coming up with borrowing strategies for Latin American clients. "The teams in GMC will be front-office teams acting as virtual extensions of the trading desks in London, New York, Singapore,'' the e-mail says.

India has a couple of key advantages over China in the race to become the West's offshore intellectual workforce. Language barriers are lower, and there's a diaspora of Indian managers already running business units all around the world.

Two-Way Traffic

Most of the U.S. and European literature on the growth of financial services in Asia focuses on whether the locals will lock up their domestic markets before Western firms can establish a beach-head to market insurance and banking and credit cards to the 2.4 billion inhabitants of China and India.

"A threat may come from the use of local expertise to establish a separate rival indigenous financial services industry that shifts the balance of global services toward Asia,'' said the City of London Corp., a local government body, in a report this month on how India and China might affect London's financial district.

Maybe that emphasis is wrong. Instead of focusing on what we might or might not be able to do to "them,'' we should be worrying about what "they'' might do to us.

While I'm not quite in the camp that says we should all be teaching our children Mandarin, the words of former Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen resonate with me. In the official China Daily newspaper's November 2004 online edition, he said the U.S. "is dreaming if it thought the 21st century was the American century.''

In Kessler's 2004 article, he takes comfort from how U.S. companies are "moving low margin, low paying jobs overseas, but, fortunately, are left with high margin, high paying intellectual property jobs.'' Anyone who believes the U.S. and Europe have some kind of monopoly on intellect is cruising for a bruising.



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